Thomas Paine Quotes

I know too much about religion to be religious, so to speak, and I am not that stupid, either.

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.

All religions are, in some basic sense, irrational.

If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

I've grown up in a generation that questions God for setting boundaries. Does He have the right to set boundaries? I've grown up in a generation that thinks where meeting with a God is an ordinary thing.

I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!

Most Christians are afraid that people will think for themselves; most atheists are afraid that they won’t.

I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.

Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.

I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny, people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and they go to church.

I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.

Faith means the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. It’s nothing to be admired.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true and then show that it is.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

I have no confidence in any religion that can be demonstrated only to children.

Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.