There is no sin
greater than ignorance.
Rudyard Kipling

The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.
- Isaac Asimov

Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
– H. L. Mencken

For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law, it is administered with subhuman efficiency.
– Eric Ambler

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the Scriptures have become clearer and stronger.
– Abraham Lincoln

In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot.
– Thomas Jefferson

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of woman’s emancipation.
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Turn your churches into halls of science and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your minds, and the examination of the fair world which extends around you.
– Frances Wright

The Bible is an atrocious book, false, obscene and misleading, tending to insanity, disease and death. . . . The Bible is the garbled literature of a barbaric and superstitious past . . .
– Elbert Hubbard

The Bible’s descriptions of the origin of life and morals are obviously fairy tales; its astronomy is terracentric; its notions of the starry universe are childish; its history is epical and legendary: in short, people whose education in these departments is derived from the Bible are so absurdly misinformed as to be unfit for public employment, parental responsibility, or the franchise. As an encyclopedia, therefore, the Bible must be shelved with the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a record of what men once believed, and a measure of how far they have left their obsolete beliefs behind.
– George Bernard Shaw

Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm . . . What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of faith. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.
– Bertrand Russell

Science reveals where religion conceals.
– Peter Atkins

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
– Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.
- Bertrand Russell

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- Carl Sagan

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
- Richard Dawkins

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
– Kurt Vonnegut

What has become of Resheph, Baal, Hadad, Nebo, Dagon, Melek, Yau, Ahijah, Amon-Re, Isis, Osiris, Ptah, Molech? ….. They were gods of the highest dignity – gods of civilized peoples – worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.
– H.L. Mencken

There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have.
– Richard Dawkins

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.
- R.G. Ingersoll

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.
- Ferdinand Magellan

I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.
- Gene Roddenberry

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
- Albert Einstein

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
- H L Mencken

Religion is against women’s rights and women’s freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.
- Taslima Nasrin

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
- Galileo Galilei

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
- Cardinal Bellarmino (from the trial of Galileo)

Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men.
- St Augustine

To affirm that the Sun … is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures.
- Cardinal Bellarmino (from the trial of Galileo)

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
- Luke 14:26