Top 100 Best Atheist Quotes
#1. Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheist joke which precisely I could have made: 'God's only excuse is that he does not exist' ... I myself have said somewhere: what hitherto been the greatest objection to existence? God ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. Religious leaders will always avail themselves of public ignorance for their own purpose.
Thomas Jefferson
#3. The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#4. I enjoy being Jewish, but I'm an atheist ... I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world.
Warren Mitchell
#5. We shall say without hesitation that the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the Spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies.
William Temple
#6. I grew up Jewish, became an atheist and a Marxist, and 28 years ago, at age 26, became a Christian.
Marvin Olasky
#7. Atheism has become a major threat to the church. New Atheists tend to be articulate and belligerent. They are aggressively engaging in "atheist evangelism," determined to stamp out every vestige of belief in God, which they insist is not only "stupid" but "wicked."
Dave Hunt
#8. Question: How do you know you're God? Answer: Simple. When I pray to him, I find I'm talking to myself.
Peter O'Toole
#9. Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God's majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire.
Neal Stephenson
#10. My father was an atheist, absent. He was a salesman; I was four years old when he told me that the end of life was death.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#12. I wanted my eternity in carbon molecules, in being part of the trees, the sky, air itself
Ruth Ahmed
#13. I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.
Denis O'Hare
#14. The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
Thomas Paine
#15. The logic of freedom of religion implies freedom to be an atheist, even though, from a historical perspective, this has not been accepted in the Muslim world.
Tariq Ramadan
#16. The hypocrite, certainly, is a secret atheist; for if he did believe there was a God, he durst not be so bold as to deceive Him to His face.
Thomas Adams
#18. An atheist is a man who does not believe the existence of a God; now, no one can be certain of the existence of a being whom he does not conceive, and who is said to unite incompatible qualities.
Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach
#19. We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.
Don Henley
#20. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#21. Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.
Andrew Carnegie
#22. The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you're an atheist, pretend how God would do it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#23. I am an atheist. I have a very different take on who God is. Man invented God because he needed him. God is us.
Carl Reiner
#24. Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
Christopher Hitchens
#25. When I was a young man, my mother said to me, 'You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist.' So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.
Norman Finkelstein
#26. Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.
Martin Walser
#27. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?
Pat Robertson
#28. I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
Alex Garland
#29. I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.
Diego Rivera
#33. Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.
Uri Avnery
#34. We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out.
Adolf Hitler
#35. Even the atheists, who have pretended to disbelieve in God, have believed in Truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
#36. There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, Protestant or Catholic atheist?
Christopher Hitchens
#37. One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been.
Richard John Neuhaus
#38. All those who possess in its pure state the love of their neighbour and the acceptance of the order of the world, inclucing affliction-all those, even should they live and die to all appearances atheists, are surely saved.
Simone Weil
#39. I'd like to think that I'm not just making the point that I'm an atheist over and over, but that I explore different facets of religion. There's no way of bringing up religion without sounding like an asshole.
David Cross
#40. Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it juast as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't.
Frederick Buechner
#41. There's a phrase we live by in America: "In God We Trust". It's right there where Jesus would want it: on our money.
Bill Maher
#42. Call me infidel, call me atheist, call me what you will, I intend so to treat my children, that they can come to my grave and truthfully say: 'He who sleeps here never gave us a moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#43. We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.
John F. Kennedy
#44. A lie is a lie
even if everyone believes it.
Anonymous
#45. There is no god. I am an atheist. It is up to us to become God. We need to be elevated, to become saints. God alienates people from themselves.
Bruno Dumont
#46. To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.
Peter Greenaway
#47. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
C.S. Lewis
#48. I was being foolish. An atheist can't stand behind their assertion that God doesn't exist. The stupidest thing I ever could have done was to reject His Truth.
Kirk Cameron
#49. Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.
Thomas Hobbes
#51. There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.
Elias Canetti
#52. If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?
Timothy Keller
#53. Atheists often denounce Christianity as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.
Nancy Pearcey
#54. Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
T. S. Eliot
#55. George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with
Justin Spring
#56. The atheist ... destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
Baron D'Holbach
#57. Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#59. I am an atheist, a rationalist and a humanist.
Pierre Berton
#60. I've always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.
Carl Sagan
#61. It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!
Ron Carlson
#62. I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
Mark Haddon
#63. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all.
Gene Roddenberry
#64. It is almost a cliche to speak of the professed atheist who cries out for help to God when he is in mortal danger. The profession of atheism is done by the conscious mind, but the subconscious still believes in God.
Serge Kahili King
#65. If you can remain as an atheist in a falling plane, then it means you are a real atheist!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#66. A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
Ricky Gervais
#67. He only is a true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being - for example, love, wisdom and justice - are nothing.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#68. If I say 'there is no God', I disrespect your belief; how when you say 'there is a God' you do not disrespect mine?
M.F. Moonzajer
#69. Atheist's denial of God's existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist's claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God's existence.
Paul Copan
#70. It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.
Charles Darwin
#71. In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.
Mark Twain
#72. The way I understand it is the communists are in, the atheists are in, the agnostics are in, but religion is out.
Jay Sekulow
#73. If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
Mikhail Bakunin
#74. My parents were secular. I am an atheist.
Ben Elton
#75. Theist and atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
Samuel Butler
#76. I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don't believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it's the end of our species.
Kevin Bacon
#77. We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#78. If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle
#79. Shallan's mental image of Jasnah Kholin was of someone almost divine. It was, upon reflection, an odd way to regard a determined atheist.
Brandon Sanderson
#81. The real attitude of sin in the heart towards God is that of being without God; it is pride, the worship of myself, that is the great atheistic fact in human life.
Oswald Chambers
#82. Atheists say no one can prove the existence of God but I say no one can disprove that God exists I see God in everything I feel his presence everywhere to me I know that he exists.
Shane Harper
#83. I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.
Bertrand Russell
#84. You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [ ... ] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#85. You've lost faith in yourself? Isn't that rich? A god who's become a self-atheist!
Orson Scott Card
#86. I'm an atheist how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people,
Ani DiFranco
#87. I have received many touching letters and emails from people who live in the most religious parts of the country, in places like rural Texas, saying it is so good to see someone be able to say I am an atheist without shame.
Susan Jacoby
#88. What am I supposed to say to an atheist when he sneezes, ah, when you die nothing happens.
Dane Cook
#89. My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don't have one identity. I'm Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish.
Sara Sheridan
#90. In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#91. Atheists are the new gays; in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office.
Richard Dawkins
#92. I never behold them [the heavens filled with stars] that I do not feel I am looking in the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.- Abraham Lincoln
Louise Bachelder
#93. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
G.K. Chesterton
#94. Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.
Richard Dawkins
#95. I pity the atheist, for he can never fully appreciate a sinful pleasure.
James Rozoff
#96. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge [a poll showed atheists knew more about religion than anyone else], not a lack of knowledge. I gave a bible to my daughter. That is how you make atheists.
David Silverman
#97. I've won every debate I've had with an atheist, and never converted even a single one.
Francis Joseph Sheed
#98. Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
Wendy Kaminer
#99. God loves atheists. The former ones make the most compelling theists because they're so empirically familiar with how atheists think.
Criss Jami
#100. I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.
Barbara Ehrenreich
