bon mots
Not all are about humanism and certainly not all are about conservative humanism, but all are very witty.
If you maximize their options you will minimize their action.
Dane C. Sorensen (1952-
If evil is necessary to the development of man, in this life, how is it possible for the soul to improve in the perfect joy of Paradise?
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
One might be asked "How can you prove that a god does not exist?" One can only reply that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been proved.
David A. Spitz (1916-1975)
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.
Alfonso the Wise (1221-1284)
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
Eric Hoffer ( 1902-1983)
"Ubi dubium ibi libertas." Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
- Latin proverb
"When we replace the traditional idea of God the creator with the idea of the process of natural selection doing the creating, the creation is as wonderful as it ever was. All that great design work had to be done. It just wasn't done by an individual, it was done by this huge process, distributed over billions of years."
Daniel Dennett (1942-
In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) Attorney in the Scopes trail (Monkey Trials)
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
Robert A. Wilson (1932-
There are hundreds of millions who believe the Messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we Christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-Christians.
Steve Allen (1921-2000)
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
The church says 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 a shadow than in the church
Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)
In the end, everything is a gag.
Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.
Steve Allen (1921-2000)
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none.
Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
If you light one candle for God, then you must light two for the devil.
(Bulgarian Proverb)
Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
The stage has ever been the altar, the pulpit, the cathedral of the heart.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it is unfamiliar territory.
Paul Fix (1901-1983)
There ought to be a law making it a crime, punishable by imprisonment to fry beefsteak.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Unknown
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
G.K. Chesterton (1974-1936)
If you believe that the Koran is the wisest book ever written, civilised society has a problem with you, because when you read this book, it's a manifesto for religious intolerance. There are a few lines in there that talk about the virtues of patience and charity, that is true, but in general this book is just stocked stem to stern with a genuinely theocratic, genuinely intolerant hate of unbelievers.
Sam Harris (1967-
O Lord help me be pure, but not yet.
St. Augustine (354AD-430AD)
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
If there is a supreme being, he's crazy.
Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)
When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
Peter O’Toole (1932-
His ignorance is encyclopedic.
Abba Eban (1915-2002)
Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
If the gods do evil then they are not gods.
Euripides (480-406 B.C.)
We have fossils... We win!
Lewis Black, on creationism (1948-
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H.L. Mencken
Religion was born from Grief and the two have benefited from each other ever since. Thus Man has tried to convince himself that death can be conquered.
Dane Sorensen (1952-
The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I cannot follow you Christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet.
Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891)
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.
Cathy Ladman (1953-
The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.
Sean Ningen
I considered atheism, but there weren't enough holidays.
Author Unknown
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Leon Tolstoy (1828-1910) last words
If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?
Unknown
Man is a Religious Animal. He 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. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.
Mark Twain (1835-1919)
Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an important source of protein.
Richard Guindon (1935-
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg (1933-
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Henry Kissinger (1923-
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
When Ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Goethe (1749-1832)
Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Everybody should believe in something; I believe I'll have another drink.
Unknown
There may be a god who will make us happy in another world. If he does, it will be more than he has accomplished in this. A being who has the power to prevent it and yet allows thousands and millions of his children to starve, who devours them with earthquakes, who allows whole nations to be enslaved, cannot - in my judgment - be implicitly depended upon to do justice in another world.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
I really think Christ got off easy when he was crucified. He should have been crucified again - the second time for god's sins.
Dane Sorensen (1952-
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Mencken's Creed
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Why attack God? He may be a miserable as we are.
Erik Satie (1866-1925)
God has always been hard on the poor.
Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793)
The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.
Mark Twain (1835-1919)
Unknown
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
John Buchan (1875-1940)
Instead of being born again, why not just grow up?
Unknown
Thomas Russell Ybarra (1880-
There is but one use for law, but one excuse for government - the preservation of liberty.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate destinations.
Martin Terman
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I am an individualist instead of a socialist. I am a believer in individuality and in each individual taking care of himself. I want government to do just as little as it can consistently with the safety of the nation. I want as little law as possible.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
Jules Feiffer (1929-
Why would anyone believe in a religious philosophy from a man who was incapable of living beyond thirty and was foolish enough to be his own attorney?
Dane Sorensen (1952-
The only good thing to come out of religion was the music.
George Carlin (1936-
Jesus was a cross dresser.
George Carlin (1936-
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Any fool can make a rule.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I may have my faults, but being wrong ain't one of them.
Jimmy Hoffa (1913-1975)
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
Bill Gates (1955-
We have a king and that king is the law. We all stand equal before that law. Government cannot by law create wealth. The government produces nothing.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Sappho 7th Century BC
God, isn't God a shit.
Randolph Churchill (1911-1968)
Socialism seems to be the worst form of slavery.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.
Unknown
It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, in Christs, priests, or creeds.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Anyone who would kill his son because they think it will save mankind from their sins is a psychopath.
Anesa K. Sorensen (1985-
I believe in marriage, and I hold in utter contempt the opinions of those long haired men and short haired women who denounce the institution of marriage.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944)
I 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 (1564-1642)
The marriage of one man to the own woman is the citadel and fortress of civilization.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
The Catholics have a Pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the Pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the Pope is mortal and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain (1835-1919)
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.
Stephen F. Roberts (1915-
We also have the theodice problem:
If the evil in the world is intended by god he is not good. If it violates his intentions he is not almighty. God can't be both almighty and good. There are many objections to this, but none that holds since god is ultimately responsible for the existence of evil. Besides, if only god can create he must have created evil. If somebody else (the devil) created evil, how can one know that god, and not Satan created the universe?
David Hume (1711-1776)
Religion has not civilized man - man has civilized religion.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
When some suffering wretch, wild with pain, crazed with regret, frenzied with fear, with desperate hand unties the knot of life, let us have pity. Let us be generous.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume (1711-1776)
Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
They who demand hypocrisy must be satisfied with mediocrity.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky - with my children upon my knees and their arms about me - I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as "Napoleon the Great."
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
Unknown
After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Religion is a kind of disease.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.
Montaigne (1553-1592)
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
John Lennon (1940-1980)
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
I hate women because they always know where things are.
James Thurber (1894-1961)
If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt.
Dean Martin (1917-1995)
The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
I am a conservative Republican, but I believe in democracy and the separation of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don't hurt anyone else in the process.
Senator Barry Morris Goldwater (1909-1998)
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Derek Bok (1930-
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Salman Rushdie, author (1947-
Q: Why can't Jesus eat M&M's?
A: They keep falling through his hands.
Unknown
Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears. ...
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
Michael Crichton (from Enivronmentalism as Religion speech) (1942-
Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
Aristotle (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)
I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Million of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Religion is a disease.
Heraclitus (5th Century BC)
Religion is all bunk.
Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
I'm an Atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
Katharine Hepburn (1909 - 2003)
The gods help them that help themselves.
Aesop
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What is the purpose of prayer? What can a finite being on Earth possibly tell an omnipotent, omniscient, Universe-creating deity that he/she/it doesn't know already? If prayer actually worked, the Pope would live forever.
Reginald Vaughn Finley, Sr. (1974-
If there is a God, he is a malign thug.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973-1057)
Soap has saved more people from disease, pain and suffering than Jesus, Son of God ever did.
Dane Sorensen (1952-
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
Robert M. Pirsig (1928-
A believer is not a thinker and a thinker is not a believer.
Marian Noel Sherman (1892-1975)
The only difference between God and Adolph Hitler is that God is
more proficient at genocide.
Unknown
Never get into fights with ugly people because they have nothing to lose.
Unknown
When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.
Lily Tomlin (1939 -
The world is proof that God is a committee.
Bob Stokes
Which is it, is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's?
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
You could see that exact speedup in the evolution of life on earth. The first life shows up four billion years ago as single-celled creatures. Nothing changes for the next two billion years. Then nuclei appear in the cells. Things start to pick up. Only a few hundred million years later, multi-cellular organisms. A few hundred million years after that, explosive diversity of life. And more diversity. By a couple of hundred million years ago there are large plants and animals, complex creatures, dinosaurs. In all this, man's a latercomer: four million years ago, upright apes. Two million years ago, early human ancestors. Thirty-five thousand years ago, cave paintings.
Michael Crichton (from The Prey) (1942-
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)