Victor Hugo: “An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
Lloyd Graham: Christ prayed: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”… Had this metaphysically ignorant Christ possessed any knowledge of Causation, his prayer would read in reverse – “Man, forgive God, for he knows not what he does.” All life attests this tragic fact, so the question is not, will God forgive man for his sins? but can man forgive God for his cruelty?
1. Simonides (556-468 BC): The more I consider the subject of God, the more obscure it becomes.
2. Empedocles (495-435 BC): None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man; it has always been.
3. Aristotle (384-322): Men creates gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
4. Demosthenes (384-322 BC): We believe whatever we want to believe.
5. Epicurus (341-270 BC): Either god wants to abolish evil, and cannot; Or he can, but does not want to; If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.. If he neither can, nor wants to, He is both powerless and wicked. But if (as they say) god can abolish evil, And god really wants to do it, Why is there evil in the world?
6. Lucretius (99-55 BC):* All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
7. Statius (~45-96 BC): It was fear in the world that created the gods.
8. Tacitus (55-120 BC): Christianity is a pestolent superstition.
9. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. Men with simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed make good Christians.
10. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) The trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker.
11. Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)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.
12. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Theology is the kingdom of darkness; Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.
13. Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) No kingdom has ever suffered as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ; If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides); History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produce these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing).
14. Voltaire (1694-1778) Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world); For 1700 years, the Christian sect has done nothing but harm; Christians have been the most intolerant of all men); Écrasez l’infâme! [crush the infamous thing – Christianity]; *Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people); God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions); Evil came into the world through the sin of Adam. If that idiot had not sinned, we should not have been afflicted with the smallpox, nor the itch, nor theology, nor the faith which alone can save us.); The word of God is the word of the priests; the glory of god is the pride of the priests; the will of god is the will of the priests; to offend god is to offend the priests; to believe in god is to believe in all that the priests tell us.
15. David Hume (1711-1776)The Roman Catholics are a very learned sect?.. Of all religions, the most absurd and nonsensical is that whose votaries eat, after having created, their deity).
16. Denis Diderot (1713-1784)The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrathFanaticism is just one step away from barbarism); Considering the picture that is drawn for us of the Supreme Being, the most righteous soul must be tempted to wish that he did not exist.
17. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.); The most serious charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ (Pope John XXIII, 1414) was accused only of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest.
18. Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), In matters of religion, it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him); No nations are more warlike than those which profess Christianity).
19. Samuel Butler (1612-1680): Christ was only crucified once, and for a few hours. Think of thousands he has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.
20. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731): Of all the plagues with which mankind are cursed, Ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst.
21. Frederik the Great (1712-1786): Theologians are all alike .. Their aim is always to wield despotic authority over men’s consciences. They therefore persecute all of us who have the temerity to unveil the truth.
22. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645): He who reads eccleciastical history reads nothing but the roguery and folly of bishops and churhmen.
23. Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771): A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.
24. Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789): If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.
25. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
26. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The death of dogma is the birth of morality; Reason can never prove the existence of God.
27. John Milton (1608-1674): Romanism is less a religion than a priestly tyranny armed with the spoils of civil power which, on the pretext of religion, it hath seized against the command of Chist himself.
28. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762): Priests can lie, and the mob believe, all over the world.
29. Thomas Paine (1737-1809): What is the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debaucery is called faith; The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion; Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man; One good school master is of more use than a hundred priests.
30. Ethan Allen (1738-1789): The doctrine of the Trinity is destitute of foundation, and tend manifestly to superstition and idolatry. In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still vogue.
31. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. The God is a being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust; It has been 50 and 60 years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac.
32. James Madison (1751-1836): During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
33. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): The Society of Jesus is the most dangerous of orders, and has done more mischief than all the others); Knowledge and history are the enemies of religion); Priests have everywhen and everywhere introduced fraud and falsehood.
34. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): You may observe that faith and knowledge are related as the scales of a balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down; The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives in America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place; The Catholic religion is an order to obtain heaven by begging, because it would be too troublesome to earn it. The priest are the brokers for it; Any dogma, no matter how extravagantly absurd, inculcated in childhood, is sure to retain its hold for life.
35. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): (Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its desolation. 11 million of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated, and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God; The name of God has fenced about all crime with holiness. Christianity peoples earth with demons, hell with men, and heaven with slaves.
36. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church.
37. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865): Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.
38. Charles Darwin (1809-1882): Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other. I do not believe that any revelation has ever been made.
39. Charles Dickens (1812-1870): I believe the dissemination of Catholicity to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world. Missionaries are perfect nuisances, and leave every place worse than they found it.
40. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895): The dogma of infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible. The ecclesiastical system is the deadly enemy of science. Evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural interventions. Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
41. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): I am convinced that the teaching of the church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross superstition and witchcraft. It is true, I deny an incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true, I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race.
42. Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899): What I want for Christmas? I would have the pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for god – is not infallible – but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils and ghosts, gods or angels. I would like to see the whole world free – free from injustice – free from superstition. One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priestsFor many centuries, the sword and the cross were allies. Together they attacked the rights of man. They defended each other. If Christianity were only stupid and unscientific, if its god were ignorant and kind, if it promised eternal joy to believers, and if the believers practiced the forgiveness they teach, for one I should let the faith alone. But there is another side to Christianity. It is not only stupid, but malicious. It is not only unscientific, but it is heartless. Its god is not only ignorant, but infinitely cruel. It not only promises the faithful an eternal reward, but declares that nearly all of the children of men, imprisoned in the dungeons of god will suffer eternal pain. This is the savagery of Christianity.
43. Mark Twain (1835-1910): Faith is believing what you know ain’t so). It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
44. John Burroughs (1837-1921): Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in 100 years than Christianity in 1800 years. Our civilization is not founded upon Christianity; it is founded upon reason and science. Skeptics and disbelievers could never slaughter each other as the Christians have.
45. Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900): God is dead. One should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air. Which is it: is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders?
46. Pierre Laplace (1749-1827): The telescope sweeps the skies without finding god.
47. Sir James Paget (1814-1899): I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible.
48. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881): God does nothing. It is not possible that educated, honest men can even profess much longer to belief in historical Christianity.
49. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870): Catholics and Protestants, while engaging in burning and murdering each other, could cooperate in enslaving their black brethen.
50. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894): The man who is always worrying about whether or not his souls would be damned generally has a soul that isn’t worth a damn. The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence.
51. Victor Hugo (1802-1885): When you tell me that your deity made you in his own image, I reply that he must have been very ugly. There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster – and an extinguisher: the parson.
52. Émile Zola (1840-1902): Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.
53. Mikhail A. Bakunin (1814-1876): Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason. Theology is the science of the divine lie.
54. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872): Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
55. William E. H. Lecky (1838-1903): Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities. Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution is the result.
56. August Bebel (1840-1913): Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in chains.
57. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882): The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy. The priest is the personification of falsehood. The Catholic Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
58. Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915): Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. God: The John Doe of philisophy and religion. Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it.
59. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. The Catholic Church so far has been the implacable enemy of all freedom of thought.
60. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief. For the Catholic, there are but two countries, heaven and hell; but two conditions of men, salvation and damnation.
61. George Santayana (1863-1952): For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindles wars, and nursed furious hatred and ambitions. It sanctified extermination and tyranny.
62. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the gospels in praise of intelligence. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
63. Albert Einstein (1879-1955): I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures.
64. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956): I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind. Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Theology: an effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing. Archbishop: A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
65. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947): I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
66. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945): All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again.
67. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983): In Jerusalem..the angry face of Yahweh is brooding over the hot rocks which have seen more holy murder, rape and plunder than any other place on earth. Its inhabitants are poisoned by religion.
68. Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950): Many books have been written to show that Christianity has emasculated the world, that it shoved aside the enlightenment and wisdom of Hellas for a doctrine of superstition and ignorance.
69. George Moore (1852-1933): Heaven may be for the laity, but this world is certainly for the clergy.
70. H. G. Wells (1866-1946): The most evil thing in the world today is the Roman Catholic Church.
71. Culbert Olson: I don’t see how anybody can read the Bible and believe it’s the word of God, or believe that it is anything but a barbarous story of a barbaric people.
72. Preserved Smith (1880-1941): There can be no doubt that the Bible became a stumbling -block in the path of progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin.
73. Isaac Asimov (1920-1992): It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind; I certainly don’t believe in the mythologies of our society, in heaven and hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons.
74. Steve Allen (1921 – ): There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely history, an obvious error, an historical impossibility..); An atheist does not hate God; he simply is one who is unable to believce that a God exist; The Bible has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths; It was only when I finally undertook to read the Bible through from beginning to end that I perceived that its depiction of the Lord God was actually that of a monstrous, vengeful tyrant, far exceeding in bloodthirstiness and insane savagery the depredations of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or any mass murderer of ancient or modern history.
75. Carl Sagan: If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.. Choose science
76. Albert Schweitzer: There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus.The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and die to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence.
77. Richard Feynman: God was invented to explain mystery.God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.Now, when you finally dicover how something works, you get some laws which you are taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore.
78. A. A. Milne: The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnoticism, disbelief – call it what you will – than any book ever written.
79. Gore Vidal: I regard monotheism as the greatest disater ever befall the human race.I see no good in Judaism, Christianity or Islam – good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
80. Arthur Schlesinger: As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for human rights.. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights.
81. Jesse Ventura: Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business.
82. Edgar Alan Poe: The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.
83. Edward Abbey: Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
84. Noam Chomsky: Do I believe in God?.. I don’t understand the question.
85. Peter William Atkins: It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods.And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.
86. Bernard Berenson: Miracles happen to those who believe in them.Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appaear to lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her?
87. Robert Browning: There’s a new tribunal now / Higher the God’s – the educated man’s.
88. Lenny Bruce: If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their neck instead of crosses.
89. Pope Paul IV (1476-1559): If my own father were a heretic, I would personally gather the wood to burn him.
90. Polly Toynbee: Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to saveour souls.Did we ask him to?
91. Chales Caleb Cotton: He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool. Some reputed saints that have been canonized ought to have been cannonaded.
92. Jerry Falwell (TV evangelist): Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.
93. Harvey Fierstein: The Catholic Church is the only organization on record to dispense money from a slush fund set up solely for the paying off of abused children’s families.So always remember you cannot judge a man by his collar.
94. Ruth Hermence Green: A recovered Christian woman: If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society’s admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?
95. Pope Greory I (540-604): The bliss of the elect in heaven would not be perfect unless they were able to look across the abyss and enjoy the agonies of their brethen in eternal fire.
96. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856): If your right eye offends you, pluck it out / If your right arm offends you, cut it off / And if your reason offends you, become a Catholic.
97. Stanislaw J. Lec (1909-1966): Sometimes the devil tempts me to believe in God.
98. Richard Lederer: There once was a time when all people believe in God and the Church ruled.This time was called the Dark Ages.
99. Francis Crick: If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong; If some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically.
100. Robert Anton Wilson :The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western civilization.