Gore Vidal Quotes

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

I'm personally a nonbeliever, so I'm struggling with if we really need religion.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

I don't believe in the concept of religion.

Nobody really knows if there's a God - not Oprah, not Joel Osteen, not the Pope. Nobody has touched or felt or conversed with God. They say they have, but let's get real. I think that is what keeps me from coming out as an atheist. I think to myself, even the atheists don't know that there isn't a God. Nobody knows anything.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

I do feel it's important to have some kind of faith in something, but [it is] impossible for many of us. I personally don't have any faith in anything, but it's great if you can.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond 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.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.

All ages of belief have been great; all of unbelief have been mean.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

The existence of a single atheist does not disprove the existence of God.

I'm an agnostic in the truest sense of the word. I think about these things - I grew up Roman Catholic, I've been interested in Hinduism, in Eastern religions, but I'm not dedicated to anything - I go through periods where I think maybe it's all nonsense; maybe it's 'The Matrix...' I'm open to various ideas.

We all have our beliefs or our agnosticism.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

I'm not really a fan of organized religion.

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.

In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.