We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Quotes
One religion is as true as another.
—Robert Burton, 1621To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.
—Henri Poincaré, 1903I 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, 1615Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
—Emma Goldman, 1910Whatsoever is, is in God.
—Benedict de Spinoza, 1677So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, c. 1950Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
—George Washington, 1796The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
—Empedocles, c. 450 BCGod is a concept by which we measure our pain.
—John Lennon, 1970The Church says that 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 the shadow than in the Church.
—Ferdinand Magellan, c. 1510An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.
—Epicurus, c. 250 BCIf God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
—Voltaire, 1764