Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
Atheism Quotes
Carl Sagan has the most entries, then Thomas Henry Huxley, Simone Weil, Voltaire and Christopher Hitchens. Weil, a deeply religious writer, is on the list because she wrote about its edges. The sourced lines include Russell’s remark in Sceptical Essays (1928) that thought is not free if professing certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living, and Woody Allen’s in Stardust Memories (1980), “To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.”
Three entries are flagged. The argument that God is either unwilling or unable to prevent evil is credited to Epicurus and disputed; the notes show it reaches us second-hand, in a later writer’s account of him. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful” is credited to Seneca and disputed. A line about having too high an IQ to be anything but an atheist, credited to Donald Trump, is marked misattributed.
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith.
It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.
Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.