Twenty Atheist Quotes from Some Surprising Historical Figures

Atheists and agnostics can never win. Some religious fundamentalists say atheists were put on the Earth by the Devil to challenge the faith of believers while agnostics are often labeled as being just plain lazy, as in not wanting to do the hard research to make up their minds either way. Believe what you will, but some of the world's most influential people have been atheist or agnostic and some of these names might shock you. Here are twenty quotes from some of history's greatest thinkers.

1. "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." - Ferdinand Magellan

2. "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

3. "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 blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

4. "Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis." - Sigmund Freud

5. "There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end." - Helen Keller

6. "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

7."A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows." - Samuel Clemens

8. "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." - Albert Einstein

9. "It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so." - Ernestine Rose

10. "All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemingway

11. "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

12. "Fear is the parent of cruelty; therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand." - Bertrand Russell

13. "Fundamentalism means never having to say 'I'm wrong'." - unknown

14. "Man has created God in his own image." - unknown

15. "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin

16. "I don't believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life." - Andrew Carnegie

17. "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." - Sigmund Freud

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

19. "Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov

20. "My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all." - Richard Dawkins