Quote from Arthur C. Clarke

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Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are serviley crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith.

—Thomas Jefferson
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

—Albert Einstein
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

—Blaise Pascal
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 greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

—Arthur C. Clarke
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have. I merely give robust expression to views about the cosmos and morality with which you happen to disagree. You interpret that as ‘intolerance’ because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, which expects to get a free ride and not have to defend itself. If I wrote a book called The Socialist Delusion or The Monetarist Delusion, you would never use a word like intolerance. But The God Delusion sounds automatically intolerant. Why? What’s the difference? I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’. There is a huge difference.

—Richard Dawkins
Some humans have always noticed the improbability of god, the evil done in his name, the likelihood that he is man-made, and the availability of less harmful beliefs and explanations. We cannot know the names of all these men and women, because they have in all places been subject to ruthless suppression.

—Christopher Hitchens
Religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

—Stendhal
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

—George Santayana
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race — before it had learned the obligation to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

—Dan Barker
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

—Steven Weinberg
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

—Richard Dawkins
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

—Carl Sagan
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

—H. L. Mencken
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
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.

—Arthur C. Clarke
Religion... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.

—Sigmund Freud
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

—General Douglas MacArthur
I am deeply disturbed by the dangerous and growing influence of people like Pat Robertson and James Dobson on our nation's political leaders. Especially after Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell both shamefully blamed America's courts and the highest levels of our government for the horrific September 11 attacks on our nation. They said it happened because we 'insulted God.'

—Walter Cronkite

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