Quotes from Famous Freethinkers

[Reason Personified]

“It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House, we might have a black man in the White House, but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.”

—Julian Barnes, interview with Maclean’s magazine, 2008.

[Reason Personified]

“If I were a CEO of a company and ran it like God runs the universe, I’d be fired.”

—Sherwin Wine, The Guardian, Sept. 18, 2007.

[Reason Personified]

“I remain an agnostic, and the practical outcome of agnosticism is that you act as though God did not exist,” Maugham wrote in his memoir The Summing Up (1938).

Maugham was a nonbeliever who saw no need for religion.

[Reason Personified]

“I do not believe in God. I see no need of such idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (1949)

[Reason Personified]

“I’m glad I don’t believe in God. When I look at the misery of the world and its bitterness I think that no belief can be more ignoble”.

“The evidence adduced to prove the truth of one religion is of very much the same sort as that adduced to prove the truth of another.

I wonder if that does not make the Christian uneasy to reflect that if he had been in Morocco he would have been a Mahometan, if in Ceylon a Buddhist; and in that case Christianity would have seemed to him as absurd and obviously untrue as those religions seem to the Christian.” D. 1965
(A Writer’s Notebook, 1949)

[nOgOd]

"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to General Alexander Smyth, Jan. 17, 182

[Reason Personified]

“—I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,
So here's to disciples and Calvary.

—If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.

—Goodbye, now, goodbye. Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye.”
" —James Joyce

[Reason Personified]

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.”
" —Ayn Rand, character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged (1957)

[Reason Personified]

“Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.”
—Havelock Ellis, "Impression and Comments"

[Reason Personified]

“... I decided (after listening to a 'talk radio' commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life that) I was both a Humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a Humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perceptual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a Humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation.”
—James Michener, Parade Magazine (Nov. 24, 1991)

[Reason Personified]

“There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.” — Gertrude Stein

[Reason Personified]

“The Chicago World's Fair having been decreed, the kind of church people who adopt meddling as a means of grace saw that now was their day of salvation. Hitherto, with their fussy restrictions on Sunday work and amusements, they had been obliged to function merely as local nuisances. Now they would close the World's Fair on Sunday and make themselves felt as pests by all nations.... The meddlers resolved to memorialize Congress to pay no money, make no appropriations in behalf of the Fair, save on the promise that the key should be turned on the exhibits every Saturday night, with no relief until Monday morning. They circulated petitions to this effect, and did such a business in collecting names that in some places they claimed more signatures than there were people.”

—George MacDonald, Sample of The Truth Seeker coverage, 1892

[Reason Personified]

“To me [Christianity] was all nonsense, based on that profane compilation of fables called the Bible.”

—Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William Haywood (1929)

[Reason Personified]

“It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.”~ Michel de Montaigne

[MrDesoto1]

I saw this on Average Godless Man
http://sight66.com/2013/01/15/the-bullshit-fr...

The Bullshit Free Will Excuse

Heaven is a place where free will is preserved yet has no evil. Such a world is possible for God to create from the start. He chose not to.

[nOgOd]

"If you ever find yourself in a position where you want to forgive somebody, the very best way to forgive them is to have somebody murder your son."

-Dusty Smith

[Hedonist]

"The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own." ~ Frank Zappa