Quotes About Atheist

“I'm still an atheist, thank God.”

— Luis Buñuel

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”

— Isaac Asimov

“Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.”

— Francis Perrin

“I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.
However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.
For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.”

— Phillip Adams

“John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [ ... ]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.”

— David Craig

“He had the look of an atheist who'd just had a visit from God: stunned, disbelieving and faintly ill.”

— Karen Chance

“When an engineer has built a bridge, the fact that a cat can pass over the bridge is no proof that the bridge is good. A train must pass over it to prove its strength. The fact that you can be an atheist when everything goes well does not prove the truth of atheism. It does not hold up in moments of great crisis. I”

— Richard Wurmbrand

“To tell you the truth, I'm something of an atheist.”

— Terry Pratchett

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Mazarin, in his character of cardinal and prime minister, was almost an atheist, and quite a materialist.”

— Alexandre Dumas

“Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.”

— Ravi Zacharias

“I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.”

— Alan Lightman

“I turned atheist in the '90s when India went through troubled times - communal riots, bomb blasts ... Mumbai, where I live, was badly affected. I blamed religion; also, extremists on both sides - right and left.”

— Amish Tripathi

“I am a religious by the heart, but an atheist by the mind.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“I discuss my beliefs less because I bed my atheist, who cannot believe in much more sacred than our kisses.”

— Thomm Quackenbush

“I call myself a naturalist as opposed to an atheist, but there are different styles. Some people just like to be close to nature. And some people actually worship nature, which is too wishy-washy because - like a lot of religious believers - they don't depend on facts.”

— Greg Graffin

“You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.”

— Studs Terkel

“The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.”

— Richard Dawkins

“When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex. After I dropped off the hitchhikers," Franz continues," I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn't used to drinking, so it made me real sick. Hoped it'd kill me, but it didn't. Just made me real, real sick.”

— Jon Krakauer

“My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn't especially religious.”

— Tony Blair

“I'm a very hard-line, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.”

— Joss Whedon

“I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.”

— Danny Boyle

“I come from generations of progressive, atheist Jews.”

— Nick Hanauer

“A Buddhist or a good atheist is as acceptable to God as a good Catholic.”

— Pat Buckley

“I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple!”

— Oriana Fallaci

“Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.”

— John Shelby Spong

“The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.”

— Evangeline Lilly

“Ask a deeply religious Christian if he'd rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don't seem so bad lately.”

— Scott Adams

“I went from being a Christian missionary to an atheist.”

— Daniel Everett

“I'm a born-again atheist.”

— Gore Vidal

“I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance! just doesn't cut it ... .”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“If you ask the religious person "What do you believe in?" he will tell you about one thing. But if you ask him "What do you not believe in?" he will tell you about many, many things! And if you ask an atheist "What do you believe in?" he will say "Nothing." The only difference between an atheist and a religious person, is one thing. If one thing isn't there, there would be no difference at all! When I say I am losing my religion, I am not saying that I'm losing my belief; but I am saying that I'm losing my disbeliefs.”

— C. JoyBell C.

“An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.”

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair

“I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky'”

— Seth MacFarlane

“What, indeed, is an atheist? He is one who destroys delusions which are harmful to humanity in order to lead men back to nature, to reality, to reason. He is a thinker who, having reflected on the nature of matter, its energy, properties and ways of acting, has no need of idealized powers or imaginary intelligences to explain the phenomena of the universe and the operations of nature.”

— Baron D'Holbach

“I grew up in a mixed religious household. And it was volatile. My dad's atheist, my mom's agnostic. Just constant fighting. There's no God! There might be!”

— Bonnie McFarlane

“Use their tactics if you feel strongly enough. Make a nuisance of yourself. Make an official complaint. Take it to a tribunal. As an atheist youre part of a minority whose beliefs are constantly ignored and marginalised while religious prejudice is pandered to and encouraged, and you have every right to be offended by that ... Remember, one person on their own cant do much, but a million people each doing a little every day can change things very quickly”

— Pat Condell

“Perhaps the best argument ... that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas ... being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”

— Christopher Isham

“It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first?”

— Pierre Bayle

“I'd like to think that I'm not just making the point that I'm an atheist over and over, but that I explore different facets of religion. There's no way of bringing up religion without sounding like an asshole.”

— David Cross

“The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated.”

— David Lloyd George

“Yes, I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as atheist some people will say, Don't you mean agnostic? I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It's easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal and that it's an opinion I hold seriously.”

— Douglas Adams

“But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.”

— Slavoj Žižek

“The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.”

— Sri Aurobindo

“I happen to be a devout atheist. I don't believe in God. I still go to church
I'm not a heathen. I go to an atheist church. We have crippled guys who stand up and testify that they were crippled, and they still are.”

— Paula Poundstone

“For a while, I thought of myself as an atheist until I realized it was a belief, too. It's a shame everything has to have a label.”

— George Carlin

“I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.”

— Rob Bell

“We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.”

— Daniel Dennett