Ambrose Bierce Quotes

The main threat to freedom comes from church ministers who depend upon fear and superstitions to gain and to keep power

People should never worship images. The spread of mental darkness is due to the prevalence of idolatry.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

How it came to pass that man, originally taught, as we doubt not he was, to know and to worship the true Jehovah, is found, at so early a period of his history, a worshiper of baser objects, it is foreign to our present purpose to inquire.

We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies.

Banish afar the foul worship of idols. On their alters let the blood of animals smoke no more, nor the soothsayer look for omens in warm entrails, nor the meaningless augur attend to the song of birds. Let all the images of the gods be smashed to the ground.

The bulk of mankind, even in those nations which are most celebrated for learning and wisdom, are still carried down the torrents of superstition, and entertain very unworthy apprehensions

Superstition is our great enemy, but bigotry is worse.

… we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

An atheist is more reclaimable than a papist, as ignorance is sooner cured than superstition.

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

I think religion is a mistake - I'm exhausted by its self-righteousness. I think atheists should start screaming for attention like religious folks do.

An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

Wheresoever thou findest a high mountain or a lofty hill and a green tree, know that an idol is there!

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

A dominant misconception among believers is that their atheist brethren are a slavering pack of hell-bound debauchees, gleefully wining and wenching their way through life while loudly professing their amorality.

The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things [witches and witchcraft] are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe.

She died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type.

Of all the bigotries that ravage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic. It has no basis in reason, it is not rooted in faith, it aspires to no ideal.

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

A woman playing God in a passion play is tantamount to paganism.