"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.""
— Carl Sagan

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
— Abraham Lincoln

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
— Gene Roddenberry

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
— Thomas Jefferson

""My own mind is my church, the world is my country, to do good is my religion""
— Thomas Paine (1737 -1809)

"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 of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life."
— George Bernard Shaw (Androcles and the Lion: An Old Fable Renovated)

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
— Bertrand Russell (Unpopular Essays)

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
— Aristotle (Metaphysics)

"I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it."
— Albert Einstein

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked and science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
— Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)

"...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish."
— David Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding & An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals)

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"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

""The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle." "
— Einstein

"With or without religion, 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

"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 Roberts

"Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."
— Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

""I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." "
— Susan B. Anthony

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."
— Isaac Asimov

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
— Epicurus

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
— Mark Twain

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said 'I don't know'."
— Mark Twain

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"
— Mark Twain

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
— Mark Twain

"It would be better for us to have some doubts in an honest pursuit of truth, than it would be for us to be certain about something that was not true. "
— Daniel Wallace

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven not how the heavens go."
— Galileo Galelei

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
— James Madison

"They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few."
— Robert G. Ingersoll

"When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some."
— Harry A. Blackmun

"Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

"I do not agree with a word you say but will defend to the death your right to say it."
— Evelyn Beatrice Hall

"What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts."
— Thomas Henry Huxley

"Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance."
— Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)

"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe and this would include my Father Brother and almost all of my friends will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."
— Charles Darwin

"The Bible, although dictated by the Holy Spirit, admits...in many passages of an interpretation other than the literal one. And, moreover, we cannot maintain with certainty that all interpreters are inspired by God. Therefore, I think it would be the part of wisdom not to allow any one to apply passages of Scripture in such a way as to force them to support as true any conclusions concerning nature, the contrary of which may afterwards be revealed by the evidence of our senses, or by actual demonstration....I am inclined to think that Holy Scripture is intended to convince people of those truths which are necessary for their salvation, and which being far above human understanding cannot be made credible by any learning, or by any other means than revelation. This, therefore, being granted, I think that in discussing natural phenomena we ought not to begin with texts from Scripture, but with experiment and demonstration."
— Galileo Galelei

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
— Winston Churchill

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins

"The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination."
— Charles Darwin

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
— Charles Darwin

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

"All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

"One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)