"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly." Victor Hugo
"Religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage." Dennis Potter
"Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains." Robert G. Ingersoll
"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." Albert Einstein
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth." Henry Mencken
"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense." Francois Marie Arouet (Voltaire)
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet." Napoleon Bonaparte
"Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope." Robert G. Ingersoll
"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin." Cardinal Bellarmine
"The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." Abraham Lincoln
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." Thomas Jefferson
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Thomas Paine
"We must repsect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart." Henry Mencken
"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Henry Mencken
"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." Bertrand Russell
"Where knowledge ends, religion begins." Benjamin Disraeli
"The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by Homo Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history." Robert Heinlein
"I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it." Bertrand Russell
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte
"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning." Bill Gates
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Steven Weinberg
"What a queer thing is Christian salvation! Believing in firemen will not save a burning house; believing in doctors will not make one well, but believing in a savior saves men. Fudge!" Lemuel Washburn
"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned." Author Unknown
"The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." George Bernard Shaw
"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." James Feibleman
"In Heaven all the interesting people are missing." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man...who has no gills." Ambrose Bierce
"I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape." Desmond Morris
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Blaise Pascal