Posts tagged Percy Bysshe Shelley

Below is my continuing list of favorite quotes from The Atheist’s Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts.

Enjoy…TPO

• I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people. ~Katharine Hepburn
• Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity— not for a sect or a party, or for a country or a colour, but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do them good. ~Robert Owen
• Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us. ~Walt Whitman
• If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 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, quite intelligent enough. ~Aldous Huxley
• I wouldn’t want my doctor thinking that intelligent design was an equally plausible hypothesis to evolution any more than I would want my airplane pilot believing in the flat Earth. ~James Langer
• For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ~Carl Sagan
• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ~Philip K. Dick
• Well I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating having a good lunch. ~James Watson
• Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth. ~H. L. Mencken
• The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal. ~Mark Twain
• Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom tailed horses. ~Edward Abbey
• The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors… . For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! ~Frederick Douglass
• It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. 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 religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ~Albert Einstein
• Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty. ~Emma Goldman

Last quote found on page 107.

Related Links:

• An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts: Part 1
• An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts: Part 2
• An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts: Part 3

Note: Originally posted on my old blogspot site on 04/05/10