Quotes about Atheism

And I, a materialist who does not believe
in the starry heaven promised
to a human being,
for this dog and for every dog
I believe in heaven, yes, I believe in a heaven
that I will never enter, but he waits for me
wagging his big fan of a tail
so I, soon to arrive, will feel welcomed.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.

If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to

 Then he is not omnipotent.

If he is able, but not willing

 Then he is malevolent.

If he is both able and willing

 Then whence cometh evil?

If he is neither able nor willing

 Then why call him God?

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.' 

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the telepathically translating Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next pedestrian crossing.

The Bible, properly read, is the most potent force for atheism yet invented.

Rincewind shivered.  He was not, of course, an atheist; on the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.  On the few occasions when he had some spare change he had always made a point of dropping a few coppers into a temple coffer, somewhere, on the principle that a man needed all the friends he could get.  But usually he didn't bother the Gods, and he hoped the Gods wouldn't bother him.  Life was quite complicated enough.

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels grateful and has no one to thank.

I am an atheist, thank God!

I don't believe in atheism.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

Atheistic morality is not impossible, but it will never answer our purpose.

An atheist's laugh 's a poor exchange For Deity offended!

The antithesis between death and life is not so stark for the Christian as it is for the atheist. Life is a process of becoming, and the moment of death is the transition from one life to another. Thus it is possible for a Christian to succumb to his own kind of death-wish, to seek that extreme of other-worldliness to which the faith has always been liable, especially in periods of stress and uncertainty. There may appear a marked preoccupation with death and a rejection of all temporal things. To say that this world is in a fallen state and that not too much value must be set upon it, is very far from the Manichaean error of supposing it to be evil throughout. The Christian hope finds ambivalence in death: that which destroys, also redeems.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"

There is not a single spot between Christianity and atheism on which a man can firmly fix his foot.

I'm still an atheist, thank God.

The best reply to an atheist is to give him a good dinner and ask him if he believes there is a cook.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

God affords no man the comfort, the false comfort of Atheism: He will not allow a pretending Atheist the power to flatter himself, so far, as to seriously think there is no God.

It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. . . . We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love.

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

President James E. Faust has noted that in contrast to earlier, God-fearing times' a new civil religion seems to be developing in America. He said: The civil religion I refer to is a secular religion. It has no moral absolutes. It is nondenominational. It is non-theistic. It is politically focused. It is antagonistic to religion. It rejects the historic religious traditions of America. It feels strange. If this trend continues, non-belief will be more honored than belief. While all beliefs must be protected, are atheism, agnosticism, cynicism, and moral relativism to be more safeguarded and valued than Christianity, Judaism, and the tenets of Islam, which hold that there is a Supreme Being and that mortals are accountable to him? If so, this would, in my opinion, place America in great moral jeopardy.

WHAT WE NEED IN AMERICA TODAY IS A VIGOROUS RETURN TO THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS AND A MOST VIGOROUS DEFENSE AGAINST THE MINION OF GODLESSNESS AND ATHEISM.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

An atheist is one who hopes the Lord will do nothing to disturb his disbelief.