Famous Atheists/Skeptics
Here is a list of famous atheists, agnostics, and skeptics you can use to convince everyone that non-believers have been around for a very long time, and some of them have been famous - and some have even contributed to the world!
Abraham Lincoln - US President
“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
Albert Einstein - World-Renowned Physicist
“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion than it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
“I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”
“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
“True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.”
“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his [sic] creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious ourselves.”
Aldous Huxley - Author of Roots
“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.”
“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”
Andrew Carnegie
“I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.”
Arthur C. Clarke - Science Fiction Author
“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.”
“Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?”
Ayn Rand
“Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.”
Benjamin Franklin - US Founding Father, Inventor
“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.”
“Lighthouses are more helpful then churches.”
Bertrand Russell - Philosopher, Mathematician
“Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”
“Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand.”
“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”
“I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.”
Billy Joel - Musician
“I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I used to go to Mass with my friends, and I viewed the whole business as a lot of very enthralling hocus-pocus. There’s a guy hanging upon the wall in the church, nailed to a cross and dripping blood, and everybody’s blaming themselves for that man’s torment, but I said to myself, ‘Forget it. I had no hand in that evil. I have no original sin. There’s no blood of any sacred martyr on my hands. I pass on all of this.”
“I believe that all important matters have to be settled here, not in the clouds somewhere after we kick off.”
Carl Sagan - Astronomer
“My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.”
Charles Darwin - Biologist
“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
“It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”
Clarence Darrow - Attorney in Scopes Monkey Trial
“I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment, to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure. “
“I believe that relgion is the belief in future life and in God. I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”
Dave Matthews - Musician
“I’m glad some people have that faith. I don’t have that faith. If there is a God, a caring God, then we have to figure he’s done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.”
Denis Diderot - French Philosopher
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
“A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist.”
Ernest Hemingway - Author
“All thinking men are atheists.”
Galileo Galilei - Physicist, Mathematician
“I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
“I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.”
“It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.”
George Carlin - Comedian
“Religion is just mind control.”
Helen Keller
“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”
Isaac Asimov - Science Fiction Author
“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 that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.”
“Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night”
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) - American Author
“Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.”
“If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian.”
“It [the Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”
“I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.”
“If there is a God, he is a malign thug.”
“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
Noam Chomsky - Professor of Linguistics, Author
“Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that — it’s astonishing. These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.”
Robert A. Heinlein - Science Fiction Author
“History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unkonwn without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.”
“Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.”
“One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh.”
Sigmund Freud - Psychiatrist
“Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.”
“Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”
“The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.”
Thomas Edison - Inventor
“Religion is all bunk.”
“I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul…. No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, 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.”
Thomas Jefferson - US Founding Father, President
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
“The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.”
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”
“Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.”
“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”
“Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Thomas Paine - Author of Common Sense
“The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
Share This“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”