Another good source for freethinker quotes

These (among numerous other quotes) are from a site called “My Favorite Quotes.”  Beware, neocons: These quotes might cause you to doubt that the United States was founded as a “Christian” nation!  Here are some of my favorites:

  • “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
    [Thomas Paine]
  • “There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice….”.
    [Thomas Paine]
  • “The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
    [Abraham Lincoln]
  • “My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”
    [Abraham Lincoln, letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln]
  • “If not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence. All his ideas of obligation or retribution were bounded by the present life.”
    [President John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson, 1831]
  • “The Christian God is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”
    [Thomas Jefferson, _Jefferson Bible_]
  • “..our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”
    [Thomas Jefferson]
  • “We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication.”
    [Thomas Jefferson, _Jefferson Bible_]
  • “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
    [Susan B. Anthony]
  • “The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.”
    [Elizabeth Cady Stanton]
  • “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.”
    [John Adams]
  • “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
    [James Madison, 1803]
  • “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.”
    [Thomas Alva Edison, “Columbian Magazine”]
  • “The Bible is “a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.”
    [Mark Twain, “Mark Twain and the Bible”]
  • “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
    [Mark Twain]
  • “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
    [Albert Einstein]
  • “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”
    [“Albert Einstein: The Human Side”, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh
  • Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]
    “Although I cannot believe that the individual survives the death of his body, feeble souls harbor such thought through fear or ridiculous egotism.”
    [Albert Einstein]
  • “You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.”
    [Carl Sagan]
  • “I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”
    [Galileo]
  • “There is in every village a torch – the teacher; and an extinguisher- the clergyman.” [Victor Hugo]
  • “Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.” [Salman Rushdie]
  • “…if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.” [Isaac Asimov, _I. Asimov: A Memoir_]
  • “Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything… just give him time to rationalize it.” [Robert A. Heinlein, “JOB: A Comedy of Justice”]
  • “The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
  • Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. [Ambrose Bierce]
  • “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” [George Bernard Shaw]
  • “We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” [Gene Roddenberry]
  • “It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.” [H.L. Mencken]
  • “It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”[Evelyn Waugh]
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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Avatar of Larry J. Carter
    Larry J. Carter

    “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.”

    [Thomas Paine]

    Belief in a forgiving God makes a forgiving man."

    [Larry J. Carter]

    “There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice….”.

    [Thomas Paine]

    There are matters in our society, said to be done by the express will of the people, that are shocking to me and to every idea I have of moral justice.

    [Larry J. Carter]

    “The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.”

    [Abraham Lincoln]

    Vatican III is not my Book and Churchianity is not my religion. I could never assent to the long complicated statements of Judeochristian dogma.

    [Larry J. Carter]

    “My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”

    [Abraham Lincoln, letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln]

    My advancing views of the incredible ignorance of salvation and the scriptures among otherwise intelligent, rational people {including christians] have become clearer and stronger with the years and I see no reason for believing I shall ever change them."

    [Larry J. Carter, posting at http://www.dangerousintersection.org]

  2. Avatar of Jill Blevins
    Jill Blevins

    Just started following today. I think I’m going to enjoy the brain exercise you’re going to cause me.

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