HOLY QUOTES
Quotes I've collected
over the years...
"The mind gives meaning to anything, but the meaning it gives is meaningless."
J. Krishnamurti
"We are working for a revolution, the site of which is between the ears."
Madalyn Murray O'Hair (missing, presumed murdered)
"Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities."
Voltaire
"The compulsive quest for certainty is not the expression of genuine faith but is rooted in the need to conquer the unbearable doubt."
Erich Fromm
"The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world. I don't believe that any man ever talked with god. The bible was written by man out of his love of domination."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-
"The hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any religious belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was unambiguously taught by Jesus."
Margaret Knight - lecturer - Aberdeen University
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelentirlg vindictiveness with which more tharl half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind; and for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel".
Thomas Paine
"Maybe evil demons helped men write this Bible, creating a false religion to keep man away from god and the real religion. That would explain a lot."
William Barwell
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Blaise Pascal 1623-1662
"The Jews, Muslims and Christians got it all wrong. The people of the world only divide into two kinds: one sort with brains and no religion, the other with religion and no brains."
Abul Al Mali, Syrian poet 1095-
"Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom."
Lenin
"Civilised men arrived in the Pacific armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers and the Bible."
Havelock Ellis 1859-1877
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Denis Dioderot 1713-1784
"With soap, baptism is a good thing."
Robert G. Ingersoll 1833-1899
"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."
John Buchan 1875-1940
"Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment."
J. Maritain 1882-
"The reasonable man adapts to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
George Bernard Shaw
"Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation."
James Hogg 1770-1835
"Their sighin', cantin', grace-proud faces, Their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces."
Robert Burns 1759-1796
"Women are born worshippers."
Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881
"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900
"Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity."
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature... It is the opium of the people."
Carl Marx 1818-1883
"The church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down."
Robert G. Ingersoll 1833-1899
��My religious superstition gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more happy day by day..."
�"Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought."
�"I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.�
(Three quotes by) Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-
"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."
Stendhall 1783-1842
"Formal religion was organised for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide."
Elbert Hubbard 1856-1915
"God is no respecter of persons."
(Saint) Peter 1-67
"Religion - A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
Ambose Bierce 1842-1914
"A comprehended God is no God."
St. John Chrysotom 345-407
"I am sure this Jesus will not do, either for Englishman or Jew."
William Blake 1757-1827
If God made us in his image, we have certainly returned the compliment."
Voltaire 1694-1778
"Men make gods in their own likeness."
Aldous Huxley 1894-1953
"If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides."
Charles de Montesquieu 1689-1755
"Women give themselves to God when the devil wants nothing more to do with them."
Sophie Arnould 1744-1802
"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect."
George Santayana 1863-1952
"People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightilly inclined to believe themselves citizens of another."
George Santayana 1863-1953
"Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government."
Bertrand Russell 1872-
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism."
Sir William Osler 1849-1919
"Dogmatism is puppyism come to its full growth."
Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857
Faith is defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H.L. Mencken
It was a schoolboy who said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Mark Twain
Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate.
F.M. Knowles
Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.
Miguel De Unamuno
Faith is not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
R.W. Emerson
FAITH � Feeble Answers for the Insecure, the Tyrannical and the Hopeless.
Darwin Copernicus
How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.
Michel De Montaigne
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Michel De Montaigne
"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
John Dewey
Someone along the corridor dislikes me and he keeps pushing mice under my door, so you see, I'm under mouse arrest.
Quentin Crisp
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell
"Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe"
H.G. Wells
An immoral god - a hangover from stone age minds - still corrupts human mentality with its scapegoat justice and the threat of eternal damnation.
(Reverend) Reginald Howard Bass
'The History of Natural Religion'
The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.
Martin Esslin
I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.
Leo Rosten
The great god Ra, whose shrine once covered acres, is filler now for crossword puzzles.
Keith Preston
"My only policy is to profess evil and do good."
George Bernard Shaw
All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland, please raise your right hands.
Attributed to Saint Patrick, though I have my doubts
It is the task of science to reduce deep truths to trivialities.
Niels Bohr
Sometimes when the laws are so cruel, so dangerous and so bad, one has to make a stand.
Australian solicitor, John Marsden, commenting on his arrest in 1967 for improper behaviour in a public place.
Puritanism is jealousy wearing a halo.
H.L. Mencken
It is the most unpopular ideas that deserve to be protected because the popular ideas can take care of themselves. It is the minority views that the majority might not agree with that are the heart of democracy.
Hugh Hefner
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein
Auto-eroticism soon ceases to be what it is for most people - an admitted substitute for intercourse. It is sexual intercourse which becomes the substitute - and a poor one - for masturbation.
Quentin Crisp
You have not converted a man just because you have silenced him.
John Morley
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Goethe
Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
Milton
"Nowadays we have access to lots more silliness, much faster, and in full colour."
James Randy
�I sit alone on the rock of my own individuality, with the waves of superstition and religious tyranny surging around me."
Josephine K. Henry
� �Nothing grows slower than truth, and nothing faster than superstition.�
� �The first thing for people to do is to get rid of the silly notion that there is anything holy in the name of Jesus any more than in the name of Hercules, Bacchus, or Adonis.�
� �Above all, teach children that prayer is idiotic. There may be one God or twenty. I do not know or care.�
� �We are living in the Twentieth Century of what is called the Christian Era, and we have not outgrown the superstitions of the First Century.�
� �The greatest danger which confronts our nation today is not political but religious, and the preservation of our free institutions does not depend upon our army and navy, but upon the emancipation of the human mind from ecclesiastical slavery. ...You can not have free schools, free speech and a free press where the mind is not free.�
(Five quotes by) Marilla Ricker 1840-1920
"We have witnessed in the notorious Jonestown disaster the tragedy that can occur from the blind following of a false myth. Yet that could be quite infinitesimal in comparison with a nuclear war which people's commitment to an Armageddon theology had let us into. It is not too much to say that Armageddon theology is a more serious threat to our human future than Soviet foreign policy."
Professor Lloyd Geering
"Only error needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself"
Thomas Jefferson
"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"
Reginald Paget 1908 -
"All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention�of barbarian invention�is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition�then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"I now incline to the view that the conversion of Europe to Christianity was one of the greatest disasters of history."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"Jesus was a fanatic, and, like most fanatics, he could not tolerate disagreement or criticism. Towards the Pharisees and others who were sceptical of his messianic pretensions, he was often savagely vindictive. Any hint of criticism, any demand that he should produce evidence for his claims, was liable to provoke a torrent of wrath and denunciation."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical young idealist: at one moment holding forth, with tears in his eyes, about the need for universal love; at the next, furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who do not see eye to eye with him. It is very natural and very human behaviour. But it is not superhuman. Many of the great men of history (for example, Socrates) have met criticism with more dignity and restraint."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"
Jesus of Nazareth (Matt. Ch. 14)
"The belief in eternal torment, still subscribed to by fundamentalist Christian denominations, undoubtedly ranks as the most vicious and reprehensible doctrine of classical Christianity. It has resulted in an incalculable amount of psychological torture, especially among children where it is employed as a terror tactic to prompt obedience".
George H. Smith - 'Atheism�The Case Against God'
"No other religion has such a bloodstained record as Christianity."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"In the name of the religion of love, large numbers of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that make the gas chambers of Belsen seem humane."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind."
H.L. Lecky (History of European Morals, Ch. 4)
"There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade�a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world�was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilisation that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain and Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the establised religion of Europe"
H.A.L. Fisher (History of Europe, Ch. 23)
"The abolitionist movement took its impetus, not from Christianity which had condoned slavery for centuries, but from the secular humanitarianism of the Enlightenment. Many of the leading abolitionists were unbelievers � Condorcet and other leading figures of the Revolution in France, Abraham Lincoln in America, Fox and Pitt in Great Britain. Christians like William Wilberforce who actively opposed the slave trade were far from typical: with the honourable exception of the Quakers, the attitude of most of the Churches towards abolition was in America actively hostile, and in Britain (to use Wilberforce's own words) - shamefully lukewarm."
Margaret Knight - Lecturer - Aberdeen University
"In nearly all the theologies, mythologies and religions, the devils have been much more humane and merciful than the gods. No devil ever gave one of his generals an order to kill children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant women. Such barbarities were always ordered by the good gods. The frightful famine, during which the dying child with pallid lips sucked the withered bosom of a dead mother, was sent by the loving gods. No devil was ever charged with such fiendish brutality."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"Watch a priest in a public conveyance. He is fighting against disturbing suggestions. He must not look at women lest he think of sex. He must not look about him, for reality, that is to say the devil, waits to seduce him on every hand. You see him muttering his protective incantations, avoiding your eye. He is suppressing 'sinful' thoughts. That type is the binding material of the Church. The appeal of sex is as natural to a young male as eating. Its suppression is a defiance of everything for which a healthy male exists. So that in the priestly mind we deal with something sexually as well as intellectually malignant. And this applies, through all the glamour of his vestments, incense and so forth, to the Pope, as to any other member of the hierarchy. We are dealing with ideas left over from the Dark Ages, in the brains of a being at once puerile, perverted and malignant."
H. G. Wells
"Women are indebted today for their emancipation from a position of hopeless degradation, not to their religion nor to Jehovah, but to the justice and honor of the men who have defied his commands. That she does not crouch today where St. Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St. Paul, and rise superior to his God". `
Helen Gardner � (Men, Women and Gods)
"Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great schemes of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey: upon the ignorance and fears of the people".
Joseph Lewis - American Freethinker
"And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathising and benevolent in the heart of man".
Thomas Paine
"Believers in the Bible are loud in their denunciation of what they are pleased to call the immoral literature of the world; and yet few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of god".
Robert G. Ingersoll
"It is not accidental that Christianity is profoundly anti-pleasure, especially in the area of sex; this bias serves a specific function. Pleasure is the fuel of life, and sexual pleasure is the most intense form of pleasure that man can experience. To deny oneself pleasure, or to convince oneself that pleasure is evil, is to produce frustration and anxiety and thereby become potential material for salvation. Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God".
George H. Smith - 'Atheism, The Case Against God'
"It cannot be emphasised too strongly that Christianity has a vested interest in human misery. Christianity, more than any religion before or since, capitalized on human suffering; and it was enormously successful in insuring its own existence through the perpetuation of human suffering".
George H. Smith - 'Atheism, The Case Against God'
"Against the heartlessness of the Christian religion every grand and tender soul should enter solemn protest. The god of Hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A god who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved; cursed, not worshipped. A heaven presided over by such a god must be below the meanest hell. I want no part in any heaven in which the saved, the ransomed and redeemed will drown with shouts of joy the cries and sobs of hell, in which happiness will forget misery, where the tears of the lost only increase laughter and double bliss".
Robert G. Ingersoll
"As a matter of fact, men have risen from a perusal of the Bible, and murdered their wives. They have risen from reading its pages, and inflicted cruel and even mortal blows upon their children. Men have risen from reading the Bible and torn the flesh of others with red-hot pincers. They have laid down the sacred volume long enough to pour molten lead into the ears of others There is no crime that Bible readers and Bible believers and Bible worshippers and Bible defenders have not committed ".
Robert G. Ingersoll
"What we see demonstrated in the United States is a fundamentalist desire for an Armageddon, an egging on of President Reagan towards a nuclear holocaust. This will be a fullfilment of bible prophesy"
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
"Both Catholic and Protestant have to face the fact that the triumph of Christianity was the triumph of barbarism"
G.W. Foote, 1887
"The inspiration of the Bible depends on the credulity of him who reads."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"We desire that the church shall not be judged by its present promises, but by its past performance. We wish to show what it was in the evil days of its supremacy, when opportunity matched inclination, and it acted according to the laws of its nature, unchecked by science, freethought and humanity".
G.W. Foote and J.M. Wheeler - Editors, 'Freethinker' 1887
You are not an agnostic, Paddy. You are just a lazy slob who is too lazy to go to mass.
Conor Cruise O'Brien � quoting a parish priest
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
Karl Marx
The exitance of a world without a God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, exisiting in all his perfections, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of hell.
Armand Salacrou
What an amazing capacity for disappointment the church has.
Nigel Balchin
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
H.L Mencken
Priests are no more necessary to religion than than politicians are to patriotism.
John Haynes Holmes
Some ministers would make good martyrs. They are so dry they would burn well.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant truth that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
This is the age of bargain hunters. If it had been this way in biblical times, we'd probably have been offered another commandment free if we had accepted the first ten.
Earl Wilson
God has no religion
Gandhi
The most serious doubt that has been thrown upon the authenticity of the miracles is that most of the witnesses in regard to them were fishermen.
Arthur Brinstead
Religion has not civilised man, man has civilised religion.
Robert G. Ingersoll
"What I got in Sunday School was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves grovelling before a Being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected."
H. L. Mencken
The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.
John Adams (1735-1826)
Science has done more for the development of western civilisation in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
John Burroughs
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
When the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence."
Sigmund Freud
The First Crusade set off on its two-thousand mile jaunt be massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan.
Herbert J Muller
In the Temple of Solomon one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses bridles, by the just and marvellous Judgement of God!
Raimundus de Agiles - ecstatic cleric
A Christian is a man who feels repentance on a Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
Thomas R. Ybarra
Most us us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
Fred Allen
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