BELIEF

“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”

VOLTAIRE

“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

“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”

ISAAC ASIMOV

“She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

BERTRAND RUSSELL, 

“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”

SIGMUND FREUD, 

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

“We believe in bravery. We believe in taking action. We believe in freedom from fear and in acquiring the skills to force the bad out of our world so that the good can prosper and thrive. If you also believe in those things, we welcome you.”

VERONICA ROTH

“The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.”

Bill Hicks

“It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.”

SAM HARRIS

“It's what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.”

KAREN MARIE MONING

“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”

SØREN KIERKEGAARD

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”

FRANZ KAFKA

“To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

ANATOLE FRANCE, 

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”

WILLIAM FAULKNER

“Man is what he believes.”

ANTON CHEKHOV

“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”

THOMAS PAINE

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”

C S LEWIS

“I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.”

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, 

“Believing takes practice.”

MADELEINE L'ENGLE, 

“Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

FRANK HERBERT

“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”

STUART CHASE

“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”

URSULA K. LE GUIN, 

“Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.”

ALFRED BESTER

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

“The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.”

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

“Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”

AMBROSE BIERCE

“You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.”

JODI PICOULT, 

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”

GARRY SPENCER

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

ROBERTSON DAVIES

“Belief gets in the way of learning.”

ROBERT A. HAINIEIN

“...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.

THOMAS A. EDISON

“I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.”

DOUGLAS ADAMS

“I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.

But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished.

And this is a damnable doctrine.”

CHARLES DARWIN 

“If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

ANONYMOUS

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