quotations about atheism
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
It appears as if you were not satisfied in recording our Atheism. You jump to the conclusion that we can have neither love nor respect for mankind, inferring that all those great ideas or emotions which, in all ages, have set hearts throbbing are dead letters to us. Trailing at hazard our miserable existences -- crawling, rather than walking, as you wish to imagine us -- you assume that we cannot know of other feelings than the satisfaction of our coarse and sensual desires. Do you want to know to what an extent we love the beautiful things that you revere? Know then that we love them so much that we are both angry and tired at seeing them hanging, out of reach, from your idealistic sky.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
The Policy of the International: to which is added an essay on "The Two Camps"
What is Atheism? In itself nothing; a denial of a positive idea. Every negation involves a position. And if every positive idea be a reality, a negation is nothing.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Let us enquire. Who, then, shall challenge the words? Why are they challenged. And by whom? By those who call themselves the guardians of morality, and who are the constituted guardians of religion. Enquiry, it seems, suits not them. They have drawn the line, beyond which human reason shall not pass -- above which human virtue shall not aspire! All that is without their faith or above their rule, is immorality, is atheism, is -- I know not what.
FRANCES WRIGHT
Course of Popular Lectures
What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination.
GEORGE TYRRELL
Autobiography
Whilst no people appears in history without the sign and palladium of a positive faith, without temple, altar, priesthood--that is to say, without a constituted religion--unbelief appears only under an individual form, sometimes proscribed, sometimes tolerated, seldom powerful, and never becoming established as the public and social expression of a nation.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
God and Man: Conferences Delivered at Notre Dame in Paris by the Rev. Père Lacordaire
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
Society must fight against this belief in God as it fought against idol worship and other narrow conceptions of religion. In this way man will try to stand on his feet. Being realistic, he will have to throw his faith aside and face all adversaries with courage and valour.
BHAGAT SINGH
"Why I Am an Atheist", October 5-6, 1930
Believers talk about atheism as if it's a pathology of a particularly odd phase of modern Western culture that will pass, but if you ask someone to think hard, clearly people also thought this way in antiquity.
TIM WHITMARSH
Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World
We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular Western societies. The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal. Rather than making judgements based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion -- the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren't intuitively there in your world. The fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have.
TIM WHITMARSH
Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World
Stripped of the opportunities for satire which organised religion cannot help but supply, the case for atheism has very little substance.
BILL SAUNDERS
"Sunlight on Dungheaps", Independent on Sunday, Jun. 10, 2001
Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.
FRANCOIS-RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND
The Genius of Christianity
The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself.
SRI AUROBINDO
Thoughts and Aphorisms
Would the atheist continue such, let him beware how he admits Love into his breast: for God will surely come along with him.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.
JACQUES MARITAIN
The Range of Reason
God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Atheism", Essays
When men live as if there were no God, it becomes expedient for them that there should be none.
JOHN TILLOTSON
"The Folly of Scoffing at Religion", Works
A man who parades his piety is one who, under an atheist king, would be an atheist.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
Les Caracteres ou les Moeurs de ce siecle
Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
HEYWOOD BROUN
Collected Edition of Heywood Broun
The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.
JEREMY TAYLOR
Sermon XX, Discourses on Various Subjects