Bill Maher Quotes

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer.

Finding that no religion was based upon facts, but that all of them were in opposition to facts, and could not therefore be true, I began to reflect upon what must be the condition of mankind, trained from infancy to believe in these errors, and to make them the rule of their conduct.

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.

Watch the things you say you can't believe, and then recall the things you accept without thinking, like your own existence.

Be sure to choose what you believe and why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

A man of good sense always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down.

Why can you believe the lie, but not the truth?

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

If you hear an old parable and you don't believe it, it's mythology. If you hear an old parable and you believe it, it's religion.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.

It is no sin to doubt some things, but it may be fatal to believe everything.

Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.