Isaac Asimov Quotes

I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

I'm an atheist. I don't 'believe' at all.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.

Faith is a poison that paralyzes the mind. In all the days of your life, seek knowledge!

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.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.

It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.

Me pray? Never! I'm an atheist.

How can a reason which hates God be called sound?

Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.

Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

There are those, of course, who deny that they need any form of authority. They are the popular atheists and agnostics. Such men say that they must be shown by 'reason' whatever they are to accept as true. But the great thinkers among non-Christian men have taken no such position. They know that they cannot cover the whole area of reality with their knowledge.

Atheism thrives on bad religion.