Interviewer: Didn’t Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn’t want to believe. he wanted to know.

The agnostic does not simply say, “l do not know.” He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of...

On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.

Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d’y croire.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – This is a somewhat new kind of religion

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of...

Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army – a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon...

Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.

Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own...

When an atheist is born, a kitten kills a god.

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine...

I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really...

I believe religious indoctrination is child abuse.

I’m a Skeptic. And I’m a Journalist. I look up things in the library—a lot! I believe in the motto of Missouri, the ‘Show-me, don’t just blow me’ state. I need evidence. I need demonstrations....

God is a book I can no longer read.

I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to...

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

[A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.

No the first day, man crea tee God

You know, people always talk about how Jesus came down to Earth as a human being. He became a human being, But no one ever takes into account what that means.

Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes ourbeliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.

How alone everyone is in the vast tomb of the universe!

This is God’s world, so everything, even if it intends to efface God, bears witness to God – understood and interpreted through biblical eyeglasses.

People say it is impossible to get out of stupidity; well, I was born religious and here I am an atheist.

On the revelation that there are no gods or afterlife:-“I do not ‘like’ the truth any more than you Avil, or anyone. I wrestled with it for a long time, for a while I was...

To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is...

The Bible has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

To understand why I jumped from the Mormon wagon train requires an understanding of what Mormons are and how they think. While Mormons have some quaint, quirky and fanatical ideas, they really aren’t much different...

Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one’s knowing: the obscurity of the subject...

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative...

When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to...

Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.

The challenge of elucidating living processes — including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as ‘the human spirit’ — is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off...

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks...

Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much towards the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has...

Billions of years ago God was creating universes and life; thousands of years ago he was creating angry floods, sin-saving human sacrifices and audible burning bushes. Today he occasionally appears on a piece of toast....

Close analysis of ‘miracles’ have never led to any proof for a supernatural explanation, and, in fact, many have proven to be cheap magic tricks, hallucinations or primitive misunderstandings of natural phenomena.

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural...

Alexander Berkman was a self-declared atheist attempting to lift the stultifying fog of the gods from the mind of humankind.

Atheism is a religion of egoism….they hate the name “God” so much that they INSIST that whatever CAUSED BigBang should not be called anything else except Bigbang.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based...

I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told “That’s offensive” as though those two words constitute an argument.

It is suspected, by some, that spiritual beings are extremely jealous of the natural world because they are nothing more than a figment of the imagination. This might explain their compulsive and obsessive behavior in...