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153 Atheist Quotes by Famous Persons

This is a long list of quotes by Einstein, Voltaire, Nietzsche and many others supporting the argument for Atheism.

Albert Einstein, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Noam Chomsky
  1. God's only excuse is that He does not exist. – Stendhal
  2. There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and at the same time, all-powerful being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. – Arthur Schopenhauer
  3. There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. – Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor
  4. God, equally with gods, angels, demons, spirits, and other small spiritual fry, is a human product, arising inevitably from a certain kind of ignorance and a certain degree of helplessness with respect to man's external environment. – Julian Huxley
  5. The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  6. There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable. – Elias Canetti
  7. It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world. – Simone de Beauvoir
  8. If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. – Mikhail Bakunin
  9. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong. – Francis Crick
  10. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. – William Shakespeare
  11. Most sermons sound to me like commercials-but I can’t make out whether god is the sponser or the product. – Mignon McLaughlin
  12. All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher. – Lucretius
  13. Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty. – Emma Goldman
  14. There was a time when religion ruled the world. It was known as the Dark Ages. – Ruth Hurmence Green
  15. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  16. A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. – Umberto Eco
  17. Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. – H. L. Mencken
  18. Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage. – H. L. Mencken
  19. Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? – Arthur C. Clarke
  20. The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history. – Noam Chomsky
  21. Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world. – John Burroughs
  22. Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them. – Peter Ustinov
  23. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. – Bertrand Russell
  24. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. – Bertrand Russell
  25. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. – Bertrand Russell
  26. Who needs Satan when you have a God like this? – Robert M. Price
  27. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. – Thomas Paine
  28. …the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any. – Thomas Paine
  29. The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. – Abraham Lincoln
  30. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing. – Maynard James Keenan
  31. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. – Albert Einstein
  32. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of “humility.” This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. – Albert Einstein
  33. It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. – Albert Einstein
  34. If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. – Albert Einstein
  35. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. – Richard Dawkins
  36. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. – Richard Dawkins
  37. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. – Richard Dawkins
  38. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. – Richard Dawkins
  39. The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. – Richard Dawkins
  40. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. – Napoleon Bonaparte
  41. Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need. – Bill Maher
  42. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. – Bill Maher
  43. The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. – Eric Hoffer
  44. If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle. – Dave Barry
  45. Where knowledge ends, religion begins. – Benjamin Disraeli
  46. The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see. – Huang Po
  47. You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend. – Richard Jeni
  48. Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions. – Blaise Pascal
  49. Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay. – Jiddu Krishnamurti
  50. The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. – Jiddu Krishnamurti
  51. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There’s not much personal about the laws of physics. – Stephen Hawking
  52. Black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen. – Stephen Hawking
  53. If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor. – Voltaire
  54. Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. – Voltaire
  55. Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities. – Voltaire
  56. Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. – Benjamin Franklin
  57. The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason. – Benjamin Franklin
  58. The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle. – Benjamin Franklin
  59. Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. – Thomas Jefferson
  60. We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society. – Thomas Jefferson
  61. The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus…will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. – Thomas Jefferson
  62. The most henious and the must cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. – Mohandas Gandhi
  63. I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mohandas Gandhi
  64. 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
  65. If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods. – Friedrich Nietzsche
  66. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. – Friedrich Nietzsche
  67. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. – Friedrich Nietzsche
  68. Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s? – Friedrich Nietzsche
  69. In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. – Friedrich Nietzsche
  70. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. – Frank Lloyd Wright
  71. 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
  72. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. – Isaac Asimov
  73. Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. – Isaac Asimov
  74. 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
  75. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. – Mark Twain
  76. 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
  77. I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. – Mark Twain
  78. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. – Seneca the Younger
  79. How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? – Woody Allen
  80. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. – Woody Allen
  81. If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. – Woody Allen
  82. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. – Edward Abbey
  83. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. – Steven Weinberg
  84. They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it’s a good thing. – Steven Weinberg
  85. I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence. – Doug McLeod
  86. The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. – Abu’l-Ala al Ma'arri
  87. 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
  88. The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. – Delos B. McKown
  89. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. – Francis Bacon
  90. A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified. – Karen Armstrong
  91. It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image. – Ludwig Feuerbach
  92. If I thought the Jews killed God, I’d worship the Jews. – Bill Hicks
  93. People ask me what I think about that woman priest thing. What, a woman priest? Women priests. Great, great. Now there’s priests of both sexes I don’t listen to. – Bill Hicks
  94. All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. – Matthew Arnold
  95. What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. – Christopher Hitchens
  96. It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible. – George W. Foote
  97. I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. – Stephen Roberts
  98. You do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate. – Richard A. Weatherwax
  99. What’s “God”? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you. – Steve Buscemi (From the movie “The Island”)
  100. As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored. – Rick Reynolds
  101. Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. – Don Hirschberg
  102. God should be executed for crimes against humanity. – Bryan Emmanuel Gutierrez
  103. To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn’t be wrong to ask. – Geoff Mather
  104. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? – Epicurus
  105. I’m a polyatheist – there are many gods I don’t believe in. – Dan Fouts
  106. A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it. – David Stevens
  107. Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. – Robert A Heinlein
  108. I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing. – Douglas Adams
  109. Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams
  110. People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.) – Douglas Adams
  111. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously. – Douglas Adams
  112. He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. – William Drummond
  113. There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust”. It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money. – Steven Colbert
  114. Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family. – Steven Colbert
  115. Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. – Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney
  116. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. – Sigmund Freud
  117. When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. – Sigmund Freud
  118. Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. – Robert G. Ingersoll
  119. The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. – Robert G. Ingersoll
  120. A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing. – Robert G. Ingersoll
  121. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. – Robert G. Ingersoll
  122. History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god. – Giulian Buzila
  123. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. – George Carlin
  124. Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money. – George Carlin
  125. I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death. – George Carlin
  126. “There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes. – James Morrow
  127. An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. – John Buchan
  128. Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people. – David Viaene
  129. If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself. – Alexandre Dumas
  130. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. – Sam Harris
  131. If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not. – Sam Harris
  132. I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose. – Clarence Darrow
  133. No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. – Annie Wood Besant
  134. I refuse to believe in a god who is the primary cause of conflict in the world, preaches racism, sexism, homophobia, and ignorance, and then sends me to hell if I’m ‘bad’. – Mike Fuhrman
  135. Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. – Frater Ravus
  136. Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have. – Penn Jillette
  137. Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. – Chapman Cohen
  138. When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. – Robert Pirsig
  139. I wonder who got the shit job of scouring the planet for the 15000 species of butterfly or the 8800 species of ant they eventually took on board Noah’s Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble. – Azura Skye
  140. Man has always required an explanation for all of those things in the world he did not understand. If an explanation was not available, he created one. – Jim Crawford
  141. What has been [Christianity’s] fruits? Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution. – James Madison
  142. The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. – Penn and Teller
  143. If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference. – Mark Fairclough
  144. Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. – Karl Marx
  145. Religion is the opiate of the masses. – Karl Marx
  146. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. – Karl Marx
  147. If God created the world, then who created god? and who created whoever created god? So somewhere along the line something had to just be there. So why can’t we just skip the idea of god and go straight to earth? – Ryan Hanson
  148. Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that. – Ronnie Snow
  149. I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. – Daniel Boorstin
  150. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk. – Thomas Edison
  151. Fundamentalism, of any type, due to its prerequisite lack of intelligent thought, could prove to be the worst weapon of mass destruction, of all. – David J. Constable
  152. To really be free, You need to be free in the mind. – Alexander Loutsis
  153. Today’s religion will be the future’s mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever. – Steven Crocker
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