John Kelly Ireland
- on religion
Religious people and donkeys: A donkey is a simple creature - it would follow a carrot on a stick, but it is still capable, even with its most basic of intellect of determining when there is no carrot.
Robert G Ingersoll
- on religion
Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.
H.L. Mencken
- on religion
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind-that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
Penn Jillette
- on religion
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
Carl Sagan
- Atheism
Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
Thomas Paine
- The bible
What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
Thomas Paine
- The tyranny of religion
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
Jimmy Carter
- Religion and Sexism
The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter . Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.
Albert Einstein
- Religion
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; 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.
George Carlin
- Religion
We created god in our own image and likeness! Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do or else you'll go to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he can't handle money!
Galileo
- Religion/reason
I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.
Desmond S Tutu
- Religion
There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said "Let us pray," and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.
Kurt Vonnegut
- Breakfast of Champions
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results; they were doing their best to live like people invented in storybooks. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often; it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Kurt Vonnegut
- On Sexuality
If you go back through history, you'll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws, and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth - those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.
Kurt Vonnegut
- Slaughterhouse-Five
Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.
Jean Guerrero
- article in The Guardian; Trump's re–election strategy is torn from white supremacist playbooks
President Trump's re-election strategy consists of convincing enough Americans that anyone who supports racial equality wants to destroy the US, while at the same time insisting that systemic racism is not real but rather a figment of the left's imagination. It's a self-contradictory strategy only a cult leader could sustain, and it comes straight from the playbook of white supremacist propaganda.
Elie Mystal
- The Nation article; “The Deaths of 150,000 Americans are on Trump’s Hands
Everybody involved in allowing people to die from Covid-19 will get away with it, because being a bad person is not illegal. Magical thinking is not illegal. Being a callous, know-nothing, anti-science, willfully ignorant Trump sycophant is not illegal. There will never be justice for those who have died from the neglect of the Trump administration. The people responsible for these deaths are monsters. The least we can do is start treating them as such.
Lena Dunham
- On Donald Trump
Millennials overwhelmingly voted against Trump. Our generation says no, as do first-time voters, to what this man and his presidency represent. We reject, wholesale, his brand of hatred and bigotry. We are the generation with the strongest and most vast understanding of identity politics yet. We recognize intersections and contradictions and want to make room for them in people and in government. America will not be great until it fulfills its promise of liberty and justice for all.
