349 "I hope, for His sake, that God does not exist -- because if He does He has an awful lot to answer for." -- Philip K. Dick

2783 "One should not go into church if one wants to breathe pure air." [Friedrich Nietzsche]

1182 "Don't try to be happy, it will only make you miserable." -- dialogue from the movie Lovers and Other Strangers

3148 "*Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief.* One who does not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. Atheism is sometimes defined as "the belief that there is no God of any kind," or the claim that a god cannot exist. While these are categories of atheism, they do not exhaust the meaning of atheism-- and are somewhat misleading with respect to the basic nature of atheism. *Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief: it is the absence of belief.* An atheist is not primarily a person who *believes* that a god does *not* exist, rather he does *not believe* in the existence of a god." [George Smith]

2174 "Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger." [Abbie Hoffman]

615 " Teaching children to pray encourages them to ask for whatever they want instead of working for it. Self-reliance and deity worship are contradictory concepts."

1645 "Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight." [_Letters from the Earth_, Mark Twain]

1408 "On most interpretations of the theistic God, He desires His creatures to love Him. However, the mystery of evil conflicts with this desire. It is difficult for rational humans to love God when they do not understand why there is so much evil. If the reasons for evil are beyond humans ken, God could at least make THIS abundantly clear. Why does He not do so? Moreover, why does not an all-powerful God have the power to raise human intelligence so humans can understand why there is so much evil? If there is reason for not doing this, then why is THIS not made clear? There is mystery on top of mystery here which seems to conflict explicitly with God's desire to be loved." Michael Martin, "Third Statement" The Fernandes-Martin Debate

1636 "There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt." [Mark Twain, "Reflections on Religion"]

256 "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

1536 "Thus no clear criteria of evidence, logic, or certainty separate religion even from its supposed antithesis, science. Instead, they are separated most sharply by their attitude toward anthropomorphism: science tries to avoid it, while religion takes it as foundation." Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 196.

3343 "What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected" [Kurt Vonnegurt, "Slaughterhouse 5"]

1476 "The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance." [Bertrand Russell]

3346 "I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless." [Peter Walker on alt.atheism]

2960 "[My] mind is not for rent to any god or government" [Rush, "Tom Sawyer"]

3491 "If BSA intends to issue invitations to children in public schools, they ought to 'Be Prepared' to abide by the admissions standards of public schools and stop discriminating on the basis of religious belief." [Elliot Welsh, on BSA's denial of his nonreligious son]

846 "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson

974 "Did I remember to feed my cat?" -- Erwin Schrödinger

2977 "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." [Bertrand Russell]

420 "The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable." -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)