Atheism Quotes - Page 35

• Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

  Christopher Marlowe

  Suspicion, Mischief

  Christopher Marlowe (2014). “Christopher Marlowe: Four Plays: Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus”, p.230, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.

  Harriet Martineau

  Superstitions, Next, Orthodoxy

  Harriet Martineau (2006). “Autobiography”, p.568, Broadview Press

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• I hope and believe my co-religionists understand and admit that I disclaim their theology in toto, and that by no twisting of language or darkening of its meanings can I be made to have any thing whatever in common with them about religious matters... they must take my word for it that there is nothing in common between their theology and my philosophy.

  Harriet Martineau

  Religious, Philosophy, Believe

  Harriet Martineau (2015). “Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (Vol. I: Abridged, Annotated)”, p.101, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.

  Harriet Martineau

  Book, Miracle, Complaining

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.233

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• My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.

  Harriet Martineau

  Christian, Feelings, Suffering

  Harriet Martineau, Maria Weston Chapman (2010). “Harriet Martineau's Autobiography”, p.444, Cambridge University Press

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• I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  W. Somerset Maugham (2016). “Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics)”, p.149, Diversion Books

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• The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Ineffable, Mystic, Unspeakable

  The Moon and Sixpence Ch. 1

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• What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Self, Democracy, Doe

  W. Somerset Maugham (1939). “Christmas Holiday”

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• The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Artist, Criminals, Limits

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• The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together... For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Thinking, Survival, Mind

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• Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Men, Answers, Faces

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• I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Sadness, Hands, Sick

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• Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

  Joseph McCabe

  Religious, Struggle, Past

  "The Human Origin of Morals". Book by Joseph McCabe, 1926.

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• Heaven is supposed to be a perfect place. Yet, it experienced a war (Revelation 12:7). How can there be a war in a perfect place and if it happened before why couldn't it happen again? Why would I want to go to a place in which war can occur? That's exactly what I'm trying to escape, aren't you?

  Dennis McKinsey

  War, Perfect, Heaven

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• To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.

  Peter Medawar

  Spiritual, Religious, Giving

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• It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.

  Peter Medawar

  Spiritual, Religious, Blood

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.210, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The idea of Jehovah was born here... Out of the rude elements of the insignificant thoughts thoughts that are in all men, they reared the transcendent conception of a God.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Ideas, Rude

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• When my eye rested on an arid height, spirit partook of the barrenness. - Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs. The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.

  Herman Melville

  Dog, Eye, Wish

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• I baptize you not in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil. (Ego baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.)

  Herman Melville

  Father, Names, Ego

  Herman Melville, Peter Fish (1984). “Herman Melville's Moby-Dick”, Barrons Educational Series Incorporated

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• The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, War, Teaching

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• When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

  George Meredith

  Christian, Boys, Fables

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• The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.

  George Meredith

  Men, Mind, He Man

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• The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves.

  Joost Meerloo

  Men, Emotional, Way

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• The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated gradtuates - people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life".

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, People, Forget

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.14, Macmillan

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• ... inventions and purely human institutions.

  Jean Meslier

  Invention, Institutions, Humans

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