756 "Once you stop learning, you start dying."

2705 "No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve." [Saki, H.H. Munro (1870-1916), Scottish author]

374 "Skeptics like to get a second opinion first."

3483 "Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural..." [Edward A. Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_]

782 "As for the 'stories' in the Bible. They are all true... at least those that have happened."

1975 "...if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul." [Isaac Asimov, _I. Asimov: A Memoir_]

3571 "The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one." -- David Hume

2118 "What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred." [Heinrich Heine]

2696 "The so-called geologic ages are essentially synonymous with the evolutionary theory of origins. The latter is the anti-God conspiracy of Satan himself." [Dr Henry Morris, President of the Institute for Creation Research, 1978]

1564 "When we describe something as a random process or an event as occurring by chance, there are two very different things that we may have in mind. ...[One such concept of chance applies to processes] that are apparently random, but have a deterministic basis. ... The process is apparently random because we are ignorant of at least part of the deterministic basis. We use words like chance and random to indicate our ignorance. We should separate apparently random processes from irreducibly random processes. An irreducibly random process is one that has no deterministic basis. That is, for an irreducibly random process, there is no set of laws of nature that can be applied to a complete description of the initial state of the system to permit the deduction of a description of the outcome." Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 86.

2854 "The things you are liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so." [Porgy and Bess]

2833 "It is fear that first brought gods into the world." [Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon]

344 "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion." -- President Abraham Lincoln

1000 "If we should put god in the Constitution there would be no room left for man." -- Robert G. Ingersoll

273 "There are none so blind as those who view life filtered through the stained glass of church windows."

1373 "What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful though, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem." Bertrand Russell, "The Value of Free Thought: How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery" (1944) in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), pp. 239-40.

3162 "Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts -- there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the other hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their religions."[Benjamin Spock]

1640 "These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible's statues. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all." ["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.124]

3400 "The man who gets on his knees has not learned the right use of his legs." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

1313 "If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence?" Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Fransisco: Polebridge Press, 1996), p. 50.