QUOTES FROM FAMOUS HUMANISTS
The following quotations are all taken from "2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, famous people with the courage to doubt" by James A Haught.   Prometheus Books, 1996.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge..."Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist."

Aristotle..."Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life."

Lucretius..."All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."

Tacitus..."Christianity is a pestilent superstition."

Montaigne..."Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians."..... "Men make themselves believe that they believe."....."Philosophy is doubt."

Shakespeare..."Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian." 

Sir Francis Bacon..."The trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker."

Magellan..."The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." 

Voltaire..."Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people." 

Mozart..."The orthodoxy of my youth is all over, and will never come back."  

Beethoven... Fellow composer Joseph Haydn called Beethoven an atheist. As Beethoven lay dying in l827, religious friends summoned a priest to perform the last rites. The mighty musician endured it, then remarked sardonically: "Applaud, friends, the comedy is over."

Benjamin Franklin..."Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

John Adams..."The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

Thomas Paine..."The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."....."One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."....."Prophesying is lying professionally."

Thomas Jefferson..."I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies."

Napoleon Bonaparte..."I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay hands on everything they can get."

Ralph Waldo Emerson..."As mens's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect."..... "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist."

Abraham Lincoln..."It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity."..... "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christion scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them." ....."I am not a Christian."

Mark Twain..."Faith is believing what you know ain't so."..... "Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion---several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven."

Thomas Edison..."I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul....No, all this talk of an existence beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life---our desire to go on living---our dread of coming to an end. "

Luther Burbank..."Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature."..... "Most people's religion is what they want to believe."

Sigmund Freud..."When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life."

George Bernard Shaw..."There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe."

Clarence Darrow..."I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose."..... "The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice."  

Bertrand Russell..."There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed."....."Most people whose intelligence is much above the average are, nowadays, openly or secretly agnostic." ....."The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."  

Albert Einstein..."A man's ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."  

H.G. Wells..."I was indeed a prodigy of Early Impiety....There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as there was a time when I believed there was a Devil....Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie....I sensed it was a silly story long before I dared to admit even to myself that it was a silly story. For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty....Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?"

Eleanor Roosevelt..."I do not want church groups controlling the schools of our country."

Isaac Asimov..."I certainly don't believe in the mythologies of our society, in heaven and hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons. I've thought of myself as an 'atheist,' but that simply described what I didn't believe in, not what I did. Gradually, though, I became aware there was a movement called 'humanism,' which used that name because, to put it most simply, humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society."....."The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has."

Steve Allen..."It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."..... "If you
pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absense of prayers."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr...."How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore."

Joseph Campbell..."What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?"

Stephen Jay Gould..."We are here because one odd group of fishes had a perculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer---but none exists."
"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science---or of any honest intellectual inquiry."

Carl Sagan..."If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote....Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy."..... "If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science."

Katharine Hepburn..."I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people."

Gypsy Rose Lee..."Praying is like a rocking chair---it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere."

John Lennon..."Imagine there's no heaven; it's easy if you try / No hell below us, above us only sky / Imagine all the people living for today---Ah.../ Imagine there's no countries; it isn' hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too / Imagine all the people living life in peace...."

Butterfly McQueen..."I'm an atheist, and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I'm puzzled that so many people can't see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry."

Peter Ustinov..."Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them."

Shirley MacLaine..."It is becoming quite clear that religion is at the heart of so many civil wars and international struggles. People seem willing to kill, maim, torture and die for a religious or spiritual belief which moves them to believe that their source of the divine is the only source...Consider: In the name of God,
a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In the name of God, murder in the Balkans. In the name of God, the bombing of the World Trade Center. In the name of God, the siege at Waco, Texas. In the name of God, Hindus and Muslims kill each other in India. In the name of God, bloody warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. In the name of God, Shi'ites and Sunnis are at each other's throats in Iraq and Iran, as are Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. In the name of God, a doctor is murdered because he believed in a woman's right to choose. In the name of God, what is going on?"