I found this while surfing today. The Top 15 Quotes by Famous Atheists. My favorite is number 9.
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. Samuel Clemens
Do you have a favorite Atheist quote? if so, please post it.
7 comments:
Was this the link you intended to post?
Here are a few of my favorites:
“…religion is a collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man is enveloped in it from birth; he sucks it in with his mother’s milk, absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so exclusively fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his being, that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and even then he never completely succeeds.” (Michael Bakunin, God and the State)
“God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.” (John Stuart Mill)
Superstition, in a thousand shapes, is employed in brutalizing and degrading the human species, and fitting it to endure without a murmur the oppression of its innumerable tyrants. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Refutation of Deism”)
Here's one more, for anyone who has ever felt aurally accosted by the seasonal cacophony of the Salvation Army:
“The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.” (Ezra Pound)
Happy holidays,
cognitive dissident
lol - thanks! that was unintentional.
Great quotes. thanks.
I've posted a few quotations. Some are not strictly atheist, though.
"[T]he effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from the self and the world as it is... in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."
-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Mojoey, you can find hundreds of great atheist quotes at Positive Atheism.
For those who aren't aware,
Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain :)
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Mahatma Gandhi
The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives Mahatma Gandhi
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