Quotes

Faith

Faith is believing what you know ain't so.

Mark Twain (1897) Following the Equator

Faith: Not wanting to know what is true.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

James Feibleman

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1842–1914) The Devil's Dictionary

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1878–1879) Human, all too Human

Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent. (Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it.)

André Gide Journal 1939–1949

It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.

Often attributed to Mark Twain, but The Quote Verifier suggests the humorist Josh Billings.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H. L. Mencken

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Unattributed, quoted by Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell

Indeed, Lars and Ann, like many evangelicals throughout the country, say that faith is so important to them that "religion" – which they associate with discord and disagreement and, therefore, if often in an unexpected way, with doctrine – cannot be allowed to interfere with its exercise.

Alan Wolfe The Transformation of American Religion quoted by Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell

God help me find the truth. God protect me from those who already know it.

Anonymous

Rationality

To free a man from error is to give, not take away.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

James Buchanan

Dans chaque village un homme tend un flambeau, l'instituteur, et un autre souffle dessus, le curé. (In every village a man lights a torch, the school teacher, and another blows it out, the priest.)

Victor Hugo L'Étincelle (no3, de 1926)

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

Bertrand Russell

The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.

Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973–1057) Syrian poet

Christianity insults our intelligence as well as our innate morality by insisting that we believe absurdities that are drawn from the mythology of paganism and barbarism.

Christopher Hitchens

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

If teaching creationism 'alongside' evolution means what it seems to mean, it is no more defensible than teaching the stork theory alongside the sex theory of where babies come from.

Richard Dawkins, The Guardian 23 September 2008.

On the list of qualities necessary to humans trying to make our way through life, truth scores fairly low … feeling alive is more important than telling the truth. We have evolved as living creatures to express ourselves, to be creative, to tell stories. We are instruments for feeling, faith, energy, emotion, significance, belief, but not really truth.

Louis Theroux, The Call of the Weird.

God

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them.

Mark Twain

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

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

H. L. Mencken

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

Henry Louis Mencken (1956) Minority Report

The movement from an understanding of religion based on dogmatic belief to one centred in spirituality and ethical activity may seem irresistible. Why do people then resist it so strongly? Because it is coupled with the admission, at last, that religion is entirely human, made by men for men.

From The Sea of Faith by Don Cupitt

A handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past.

The president of the Association of Greek Clergymen describing contemporary followers of the Olympians gods (apparently without irony). Quoted in BHA News for January/February 2007.

The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of discomfiture or serious criticism has led the devout to "save" their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves.

Daniel Dennett Breaking the Spell

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Richard Dawkins (2004) A Devil's Chaplain

Religious war

… killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.

Rich Jeni (comedian) quoted by Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell

Kill them all. God will know his own.

Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux and Papal Legate to the Crusaders, during the "Albigensian Crusade" against the Cathar heresy in Southern France (1209).

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764.

Fanaticism is the greatest danger there is – I might almost say that I was fanatically against fanaticism.

Bertrand Russell

Politics

He speaks of being ready 'to meet my maker' and answer for 'those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions'.

Peter Stothard reporting a discussion with Tony Blair in Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War by Peter Stothard.

I would be more reassured to hear that the Tory leader [David Cameron] goes to church because that is what it takes to get a child into the best of state schools, not because he is a believer.

Michael Portillo, Sunday Times, 25 February 2007.

No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

George H. W. Bush talking to Robert I. Sherman of American Atheist Press (1987).

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

Seneca the Younger, c. 5 BCE–65 CE.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Napoleon Bonaparte

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the dark ages.

Ruth Hermence Green The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible

Morality

The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another's customs and opinions; respect for one another's rights and feelings; awareness of one another's needs.

A J Ayer The Humanist Outlook, 1968

May I do to others as I would that they should do unto me.

Plato c. 4 BCE

Without doubt the greatest injury was done by basing morals on myth, for sooner or later myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

Lord Herbert Louis Samuel

… there is a very real evil consequent on ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them, and protects them from being discussed or criticised. … Wherever morality is supposed to be of supernatural origin, morality is stereotyped.

John Stuart Mill

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008)

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

Steven Weinberg (1933– ) Nobel Laureate in physics

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.)

Lucretius (c. 95–55 BCE) De Rerum Natura

The choice to let one's life be guided by moral reasons or reasons of self-interest is, I think, ultimately an arational choice. The choice is ultimately one of self-definition: it is a choice guided not by by reasons but by your image of the sort of person you want to be.

Mark Rowlands The Philosopher at the End of the Universe

Immortality

All the evidence is that we require a functioning brain to have any thoughts at all. The idea, therefore, that we could go on thinking after death in some transcendental realm doesn't square with what we know about our human nature.

Julian Baggini What's it all about?

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.

Bertrand Russell What I Believe

David Hume said to me he was no more uneasy to think he should not be after this life, than that he had not been before he began to exist.

James Boswell The Life of Johnson

But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

Richard Dawkins interviewed by Sheena McDonald, Channel 4 television, 1994.

Meaning of life

After all, it is as respectable to be a modified monkey [Darwin] as to be modified dirt [Genesis].

T. H. Huxley in a letter to Frederick Dyster

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene.

The search for meaning is essentially personal. … our lives were not created with any purpose or goal in mind and … there is nothing beyond or after life that can provide a purpose for what we do in this life. … life can be meaningful if we find it worth living for its own sake, without recourse to further aims, goals or purposes.

Julian Baggini What's It All About?.

Your life is not lying in wait in the future like a wild animal or some ominous destiny. Nor is it hidden in the heavens, like a paradise or promise. Nor is it shut up in the cave or the prison of your past. It is here and now; it is what you live and what you do. At the heart of being; at the heart of the present; at the heart of everything – in the great current of life, of reality.

André Comte-Sponville, French philosopher, The Little Book of Philosophy

So we can spend our lives not in living, but in trying to interpret our lives, according to some system of belief that points us away from the life we are actually having to an entirely hypothetical life about which we can know nothing. A better way to approach the business is to begin by accepting that this life is it; that this actual being that we have and the universe in which we have it, no matter how it arose, is IT, so that this is what we must get on with.

Richard Holloway, formerly Episcopalian Primus and Bishop of Edinburgh

Life's fulfilment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals. We aim for our fullest possible development and animate our lives with a deep sense of purpose, finding wonder and awe in the joys and beauties of human existence, its challenges and tragedies, and even in the inevitability and finality of death. Humanists rely on the rich heritage of human culture and the life-stance of Humanism to provide comfort in times of want and encouragement in times of plenty.

American Humanist Association Humanism and Its Aspirations.

Now, here's the meaning of life. … Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Monty Python The Meaning of Life (film).