Positive Atheism Quotes - Page 11

• The burden of all song and praise "unto the Highest" has been that God stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth.

  Emma Goldman

  Country, Song, Men

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

  George Santayana

  Believe, People, World

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• Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been “authorized by the Bible” and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit.

  Helen H. Gardener

  Christian, Country, Atheism

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• The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding.

  Lord Acton

  Heart, Understanding, Atheism

  John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom (and other Essays)”, p.36, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts: they know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance.

  Douglas Adams

  Airports, People, Atheism

  Douglas Adams (2016). “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.249, Simon and Schuster

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• The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

  Henry Adams

  Men, Ideas, Atheism

  Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Adams (2016). “Great American Lives: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and The Education of Henry Adams”, p.1519, Open Road Media

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• There is in the clergy of all Christian denominations a time-serving, cringing, subservient morality, as wide from the spirit of the gospel as it is from the intrepid assertion and vindication of truth.

  John Quincy Adams

  Christian, Atheism, Spirit

  John Quincy Adams (1951). “Diary, 1794-1845: American Diplomacy and Political, Social, and Intellectual Life from Washington to Polk”

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• The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.

  Jane Addams

  Father, Writing, Temptation

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• The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith - that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Lying, Mind, Atheism

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations", 10th edition, 1919.

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• The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery, on the other hand, is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Religious, Light, Hands

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations", 10th edition, 1919.

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• This whole Christian theology thing is that god came down to experience life through his son. Well, how's he experiencing life if he doesn't get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the apparatus in the first place?

  Tori Amos

  Christian, Son, Giving

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• When I sent out a casual and nonscientific poll of my own to a wide cast of acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I was surprised, but not really, to learn that maybe 60 percent claimed a belief in a God of some sort, including people I would have bet were unregenerate skeptics. Others just shrugged. They don't think about this stuff. It doesn't matter to them. They can't know, they won't beat themselves up trying to know and for that matter they don't care if their kids believe or not.

  Natalie Angier

  Believe, Kids, Thinking

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• Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Christian, Blessing, Names

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (1889). “History of woman suffrage”

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• What can be accomplished by a few principles is not effected by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle, which is nature, and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle, which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God's existence.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Atheism, Principles, Needs

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• If the hammer and the shuttle could move themselves, slavery would be unnecessary.

  Aristotle

  Moving, Atheism, Would Be

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• Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.

  Karen Armstrong

  Nice, Atheism, Desire

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• A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms.

  Karen Armstrong

  Giving, Silence, Atheism

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• The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

  Raymond Aron

  Intellectual, Atheism, Want

  Raymond Aron (2001). “The Opium of the Intellectuals”, p.257, Transaction Publishers

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• Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

  Raymond Aron

  Atheism, Events, Chance

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• One would suppose that the battle for religious liberty was won in the United States two hundred years ago. However, in the time since, and right now, powerful voices are always raised in favor of bigotry and thought control. It is useful, then, to have a compendium of the thoughts of great men and women of all faiths (and of none) on the subject, to convince us that we men and woman of freedom are not and never have been alone.

  Isaac Asimov

  Religious, Powerful, Men

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• Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.

  Saint Augustine

  Lust, Atheism, Capricious

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• If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.

  A.J. Ayer

  Atheist, Atheism, Nonsensical

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• Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.

  A.J. Ayer

  Confused, Atheism, Impossible

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• I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

  A.J. Ayer

  Thinking, Atheism, Facts

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• When church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued.

  Isaac Backus

  Church, Together, Atheism

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