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ATHEISM

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see: "RELIGION" for related links


[Sandy Bates (Woody Allen) speaking:]
To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition.
--Woody Allen [Allen Stewart Konigsberg] (b. 1935)
American actor, screenwriter, and director.
Dialogue "Stardust Memories" [1980 film]

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 (1920—1992)
Russian-born American author.
Quoted in Janet Asimov _It's Been a Good Life_ [2002].

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to
atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth
men's minds to religion.
--Francis Bacon (1561—1626)
English philosopher and essayist.
_Essays_ [1625] "Of Atheism"

Nobody talks so constantly about God as
those who insist there is no God.
--Heywood Broun (1888—1939)
American journalist & father of Heywood Hale Broun.
Attributed in Lloyd Cory _Quote Unquote_, p. 23 [1977].

I have heard an atheist defined as a man
who had no invisible means of support.
--John Buchan (1875—1940)
Scottish novelist and Govenor-General of Canada [1935—1940].
Speech to the Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto [21 February 1936].

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism
is the most important in the world. I further believe that
the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the
same struggle reproduced on another level.
--William F. Buckley Jr. (1925—2008)
American author and journalist.
"God and Man at Yale" [1951]

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now
it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
--G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton (1874—1936)
English essayist, novelist, and poet.
_Heretics_ [1905]

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was
an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said,
'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of
the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'
--Quentin Crisp [Denis Pratt] (1908—1999)
English writer.
Interview with the author in Jon Winokur _The Portable Curmudgeon_ [1992].

There are no atheists in the foxholes.
--William Thomas Cummings (1903—1945)
American priest.
Field sermon, Bataan [1942].

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
--Clarence Darrow (1857—1938)
American lawyer.
Speech in Toronto, Canada [1930].

Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same
kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the
same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of
their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are
creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the
people'—cannot bear the music of the spheres.
--Albert Einstein (1879—1955)
German-American physicist.
—Letter to unidentified addressee [7 August 1941].

It's a dirty, low thing to do for the Catholic Church to continue
its subversive activity in every way possible and now even to extend
its propaganda to Protestant children evacuated from the regions
threatened by air raids. Next to the Jews these politico-divines are
about the most loathsome riffraff that we are still sheltering in
the Reich. The time will come after the war for an over-all solution
of this problem.
--Joseph Goebbels (1897—1945)
German Nazi leader & minister of propaganda.
26 March 1942 entry in _The Goebbels Diaries_ [1948].

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has
ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation,
Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the
saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be
swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if
He does not receive their flattery. Yet this absurd
fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it,
pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and
least productive industry in all history.
--Robert A(nson) Heinlein (1907—1988)
American science-fiction writer.
_Time Enough for Love_ "Intermission" [1973]

I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing
we can know except that we should be kind to each
other and do what we can for other people.
--attributed to Katharine Hepburn (1907—2003)
American stage and motion-picture actress; winner of four Academy Awards.

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile
to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false
one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious
belief itself.
--Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949)
British journalist, author, and literary critic.
"Free Inquiry" [Fall 1996]

Neither of the denominations — Catholic or Protestant,
they are both the same — has any future left ... That
won't stop me tearing up Christianity in Germany, root
and branch. One is either a Christian or a German. You
can't be both.
--Adolf Hitler (1889—1945)
German dictator.
1933 remark to Herman Rauschning, quoted in
Donald J. Dietrich _Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich_ [1988].

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 (1902—1983)
American longshoreman, philosopher, and author who
received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1982.
_The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements_
[1951], Part 3, "United Action and Self-Sacrifice" XIII

Ignorance and fear are the two hinges of all
religion. The uncertainty in which man finds
himself in relation to his God, is precisely the
motive that attaches him to his religion.
--Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723—1789)
French philosopher and encyclopedist.
_Good Sense, or Natural Ideas vs Supernatural Ideas_ [1772]
"Refutation of Arguments for the Existence of God", Sec. 10

If we did a good act merely from the love of God and
a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the
morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do,
that no such being exists. We have the same evidence
of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their
own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of
them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while
in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic
Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic
countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert,
D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been
among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then,
must have had some other foundation than the love
of God.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826)
American statesman and president [1801—1809].
Letter to Thomas Law [13 June 1814].

I should like to see a man sober in his habits, moderate,
chaste, just in his dealings, assert that there is no God;
he would speak at least without interested motives; but
such a man is not to be found.
--Jean de La Bruyθre (1645—1696)
French essayist and moralist.
_Les Caractθres_ [1688]

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
--attributed to V.I. Lenin (1870—1924)
Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (1917—1924).

-

The human race has suffered for centuries and is still
suffering from the mental disorder known as religion,
and atheism is the only physician that will be able to
effect a permanent cure.
--Joseph Lewis (1889—1968)
American author and teacher.
_Atheism and Other Addresses_ [1999 ed.]


When man comes to the realization that he is not
the "favorite" of God; that he was not specifically
created, that the universe was not made for his
benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws
of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not
until then, will he understand that he must rely
upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever
benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and
energies to helping himself and his fellow men
to meet the exigencies of life and to set about
to solve the difficult and intricate problems of
living.
--Joseph Lewis (1889—1968)
American author and teacher.
"An Atheist Manifesto" [1954]

-

The churches used to win their arguments against
atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by
burning the ism-ists, which is fine proof that there
is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.
--Ben Barr Lindsey (1869—1943)
American judge.
_The Revolt of Modern Youth_ [1925]

The pious man and the atheist always talk of religion;
the one speaks of what he loves, and the other of what
he fears.
--Baron de Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat) (1689—1755)
French philosopher, jurist, and satirist.
_The Spirit of the Laws_, vol. 2, bk. XXV, ch. I [1748]

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does
not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).
--George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1903—1950)
English novelist.
_Down and Out in Paris and London_, ch. 30 [1933]

What use is it to us to hear it said of a man that
he has thrown off the yoke, that he does not believe
there is a God to watch over his actions, that he
reckons himself the sole master of his behavior,
and that he does not intend to give an account of
it to anyone but himself? Does he think that in
that way he will have straightway persuaded us to
have complete confidence in him, to look to him
for consolation, for advice, and for help, in the
vicissitudes of life? Do such men think that they
have delighted us by telling us that they hold our
souls to be nothing but a little wind and smoke —
and by saying it in conceited and complacent tones?
Is that a thing to say blithely? Is it not rather
a thing to say sadly — as if it were the saddest
thing in the world?
--Blaise Pascal (1623—1662)
French mathematician, physicist, and moralist.
_Pensιes_ [1670]

Few men are so obstinate in their atheism, that
a pressing danger will not compel them to the
acknowledgement of a divine power.
--Plato (427?—347 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.
Attributed in Tryon Edwards _A Dictionary of Thoughts_ [1891].

I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant
one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate
of reason and that I am fighting *for* reason, not
*against* religion. I must also mention that I do
respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in
the sense that it represents an early form of
philosophy.
--Ayn Rand (1905—1982)
Russian-born American writer.
_Letters of Ayn Rand_ [20 March 1965]

No one is so much alone in the world as a denier of God.
--Jean Paul Richter (1763—1825)
German novelist.
Attributed in Maturin M. Ballou _Edge-Tools of Speech_, p. 27 [1886].

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.
--attributed to Sir Stephen Henry Roberts (1901—1971)
Australian historian.

I was told that the Chinese said they would bury me
by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory.
I have some slight regret that this did not happen
as I might have become a god, which would have been
very chic for an atheist.
--Bertrand Russell (1872—1970)
British philosopher, mathematician, and Nobel laureate.
_Autobiography_ [1968]

My atheism . . . is true piety towards the universe
and denies only gods fashioned by men in their
own image, to be servants of their human interests.
--George Santayana (1863—1952)
Spanish-born philosopher and critic.
"On My Friendly Critics" _Soliloquies in England_ [1922]

[My grandmother] believed in nothing. Her skepticism
alone kept her from being an atheist.
--Jean-Paul Sartre (1905—1980)
French philosopher, novelist, and dramatist;
winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature.
_The Words_ [1964], tr. Bernard Frechtman [1981]

Today's atheism is not passive, like the old-fashioned
atheism, which allowed believers to exist alongside of
it; it is now militant, active, political, proselytizing,
and communistic.
--Fulton John Sheen (1895—1979)
Roman Catholic bishop; the first popular preacher to appear on television.
_Lift Up Your Heart_ [1942]

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.
The Christian is composed by the belief of a wise, all-ruling
Father, whose presence fills the void unknown with light
and order; but to the man who has dethrowned God, the
spirit-land is indeed, in the words of the Hebrew poet,
"a land of darkness and in the shadow of death," without
any order, where the light is as darkness. Life and death
to him are haunted grounds, filled with the goblin forms
of vague and shadowy dread.
--Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811—1896)
American writer and philanthropist.
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ [1852]

[T]hat the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of
atoms; which I will no more believe than that the accidental
jumbling of the letters of the alphabet, could fall by chance
into a most ingenious and learned treatise of philosophy.
--Jonathan Swift (1667—1745)
Anglo-Irish poet and satirist.
"A Tritical Essay Upon the Faculties of the Mind" [1707-1711]

What can be more foolish than to think that all this
rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance,
when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
--Jeremy Taylor (1613—1667)
English Anglican clergyman and writer.
Quoted in Rev. B.H. Draper (ed.)
_The Amaranth; A Selection of Religious and Perceptive Pieces in Prose_ [1840].

I once wanted to become an atheist but
I gave up . . . they have no holidays.
--attributed to Henny Youngman (1906—1998)
English-born American stand-up comedian.

To sustain the belief that there is no God, it [atheism]
has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount
to saying, 'I have infinite knowledge that there is no being
in existence with infinite knowledge.'
--Ravi Zacharias (b. 1946)
Indian-born Canadian theologian.
_The Real Face of Atheism_, p. 36 [2004]

-

Atheism: a non-prophet organization.
--anon.


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