"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826) American president, author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat. Deist, avid separationist.
"During almost fifteen 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." ... "In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people." ... "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." - James Madison, (1751-1836) American president and political theorist. Popularly known as the "Father of the Constitution." More than any other framer he is responsible for the content and form of the First Amendment.
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."... Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it." ... "But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed." ... "The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles." - John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd President of the United States.
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx, German political philosopher and economist (1818-1883).
"Faith is believing something you know ain't true." ... "Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of." ... "There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad." - Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist (1835-1910).
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." ... "So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake... Religion is all bunk." - Thomas Edison, American inventor (1847-1931).
"In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable." ... "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." - Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian physician and pioneer psychoanalyst.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish-born English playwright.
"Thus I came...to a deep religiosity, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true....Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience...an attitude which has never left me." ... "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German born American threoretical physicist.
"All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), American author.
"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 that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." - Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), Russian-born American author.
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." ... "I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race." ... "Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?" - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher.
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." ... "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790), American public official, writer, scientist, and printer who played a major part in the American Revolution.
"No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and I; and all religion ... is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry." - Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), American writer.
"Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men."... "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." ... "Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities." - Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778), French philosopher and writer whose works epitomize the Age of Enlightenment.
"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 (341–270 B.C.), Greek philosopher.
"Secularism is a 'religion', a religion that is understood. It has no mysteries, no mumblings, no priests, no ceremonies, no falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions. It considers the lilies of the field, and takes thought for the morrow. It says to the whole world, Work that you may eat, drink, and be clothed; work that you may enjoy; work that you may not want; work that you may give and never need." ... "As people become more intelligent they care less for preaches
and more for teachers" ... "Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?" ... "Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms." - Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), Well known post civil war American political speechmaker and Secular-Humanist.
"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand." ... "And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have suc