Great Atheist Quotes

Here are a few notable people with the courage to publicly question the idea of God:

Mark Twain - author / humorist

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

Frank Zappa - American musician

"If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine...but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good...and CARES about any of it...to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working. "

"The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on."

Freidrich Nietzsche - philosopher

"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

"All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and understandable in his communications."

Gene Roddenberry - creator of Star Trek

"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain."

"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."

John Adams - U.S. President / Founding Father of the United States

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."

Stephen Roberts - author

"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."

Seneca the Younger - 4 b.c.- 65 a.d.

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."

Albert Einstein

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; 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."

Richard Dawkins - author

"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one."

Carl Sagan - astronomer & astrochemist

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."

Bertrand Russell - British philosopher / mathematician / rationalist

"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them."

Thomas Jefferson - founding father

"Shake off all the 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 be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear"

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God."

Penn Jillette - comedian / performer

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.

George Bernard Shaw - Irish author

"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."