"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

"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

"To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition."
— Woody Allen

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."
— C.S. Lewis

"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

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
— Douglas Adams

"If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
— Woody Allen

"All thinking men are atheists."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"If one were to take the Bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the Bible seriously, one must be already mad."
— Aleister Crowley

"Atheism is a non-prophet organization."
— George Carlin

"Belief is the death of intelligence."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time.
She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic."
— Woody Allen

"Looked into the sky, heavy with smoke and human fat, and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. It is not God that kills the children, not fate the butchers them, nor destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Agnostics are just atheists without balls."
— Stephen Colbert (I Am America: And So Can You!)

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."
— Carl Sagan

"A cult is a religion with no political power."
— Tom Wolfe

"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
— Albert Camus

"[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies."
— Mark Twain

"Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"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 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)

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."
— Albert Einstein

"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

-this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else."
— Richard Dawkins

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."
— Christopher Hitchens

"Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!"
— Douglas Adams

"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."
— Edmond De Goncourt

"All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.'"
— Marcel Duchamp

"The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation."
— Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)

"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
— Quentin Crisp

"How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"
— Woody Allen

"It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"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."
— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"Chance favors the prepared mind."
— Louis Pasteur

"A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one."
— Richard K. Morgan (Broken Angels)

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

""To hate man and love god seems to be the sum of all creeds.""
— Robert Ingersoll

"I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly."
— Voltairine de Cleyre

"Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?"
— David Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

"I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world."
— Georges Duhamel

"He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve."
— George Orwell

"If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession."
— Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln : Speeches and Writings 1832-1858)

"I'm a Skeptic. And I'm a Journalist. I look up things in the library—a lot! I believe in the motto of Missouri, the 'Show-me, don't just blow me' state. I need evidence. I need demonstrations. I need show-and-tell. Even though I pray to God every once in a while, especially when I'm in trouble—which for most guys my age is every 28 days—I still think deeply about the issues and don't automatically jump to a religious or mystical answer to questions. I am, by nature, doubtful about the existence of God, and even whether He is a He or a Her. I don't believe in New Age stuff. For me, 'Past Life Regression' means not calling a girl after she gives me her phone number. Sure I own a lucky rabbit's foot, a lucky penny, a lucky 4-leaf clover and a lucky horeshoe [sic], and a pair of lucky underwear and several pairs of lucky socks that I only wash every seven days. But under it all I am a died–in-the-wool skeptic."
— Earl Lee (Raptured: The Final Daze of the Late, Great Planet Earth)