Aileen Schmidt > Aileen's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 100

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

#1

“There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.”
― George Gordon Byron

331 likes

#2

“I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.”
― Herman Melville

tags: christian, courtesy, friend, kindness, pagan

77 likes

#3

“I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

tags: mary-malone, morality

1077 likes

#4

“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: atheism, child-abuse, children, feminism, hell, religion, religion-and-children, rhetorical-questions, sexism, women, women-and-religion

1508 likes

#5

“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: atheism, cruelty, ethics, ethics-in-religion, morality, morality-without-religion, religion, selfishness, stupidity

759 likes

#6

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

tags: atheism, religion

8908 likes

#7

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin

tags: atheism, humor, life, religion

6679 likes

#8

“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, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

tags: atheism, religion, skeptic

3592 likes

#9

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: atheism, reason, science, skeptic

3325 likes

#10

“All thinking men are atheists.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

tags: atheism, inspirational

2624 likes

#11

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: atheism, organized-religion, paradox, religion

2949 likes

#12

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

tags: absurdities, atheism, atrocities, barbarity, injustice, religion, skepticism

3172 likes

#13

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: afterlife, atheism, humanism, secularism

2183 likes

#14

“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

tags: atheism, intelligence

1632 likes

#15

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: atheism, bible, organized-religion, religion

1565 likes

#16

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

tags: atheism, organized-religion, religion

1538 likes

#17

“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.”
― Emmett F. Fields

tags: atheism, misattributed-to-carl-sagan, religion

1105 likes

#18

“Atheism is a non-prophet organization.”
― George Carlin

tags: atheism

961 likes

#19

“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

tags: atheism, belief, blind, blind-faith, blindness, christian-faith, christian-miracle, critical-thinking, critical-thought, death-of-reason, doubt, doubt-is-sin, eternity, existence, foundation-of-belief, human-nature, intoxication, meaning, meaning-of-life, metaphor, miracle, myth, nature, origin, philosophy, purpose, purpose-of-life, reason, reflection, religious-faith, resurrection, resurrection-of-jesus, sin, sinful, thinking, thoughts, wasted-life

1102 likes

#20

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”
― Douglas Adams

tags: atheism, belief, burden-of-proof, explanation, humor, interview, science

774 likes

#21

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: agnostic, atheism, atheist, belief, emotion, humanist, interview, knowledge, reason, religion, respect, science

920 likes

#22

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

tags: atheism, death, inspirational, life

752 likes

#23

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
― Carl Sagan

tags: atheism, science

866 likes

#24

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

tags: atheism, bible, god, religion

835 likes

#25

“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
― Carl Sagan

tags: atheism, education, religion, science

813 likes

#26

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: atheism, expectation, humanism, humanist, morality, reward, secular-morality

608 likes

#27

“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 believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up.”
― George Carlin

tags: atheism, god, humor

557 likes

#28

“If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

616 likes

#29

“[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

526 likes

#30

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

tags: atheism, religion, science

514 likes

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

All Quotes

Aileen Schmidt > Aileen's Quotes

Tags From Aileen’s Quotes