"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."
— Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer)

"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake."
— Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

"Man can get used to anything, the scoundrel."
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights and Other Stories)

""After all, man may be fond not only of
well-being. Perhaps he is just as fond
of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just
as much in his interest as well-being?""
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain"
— Friedrich von Schiller

"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

"Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"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

"As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods."
— Bertrand Russell

"Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately."
— Scott Adams

"I'm the world's least happy atheist. I miss having religious faith, but trying to have it seems like trying to be in love with someone that you're not in love with."
— Lisa Williams

"She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"He who possesseth little is so much the less possessed. Blessed be moderate poverty!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money."
— George Carlin

"Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!"
— Stephen Colbert (I Am America: And So Can You!)

"I'm telling you, it's fu**ing hard to be classy"
— Janet Evanovich (One for the Money)

"If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself. Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
— Laozi

"This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum."
— Elbert Hubbard

"We’re all searching for something to fill up what I like to call that big, God-shaped hole in our souls. Some people use alcohol, or sex, or their children, or food, or money, or music, or heroin. A lot of people even use the concept of God itself. I could go on and on. I used to know a girl who used shoes. She had over two-hundred pairs. But it’s all the same thing, really. People, for some stupid reason, think they can escape their sorrows."
— Tiffanie DeBartolo (God-Shaped Hole)

"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."
— Charles Bukowski