Charles Eliot Norton Quotes

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

It is better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite.

Only Atheists have morals, the religious have reward and punishment. That's not morality, that's sucking up.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

A good man, is a good man, whether in this church, or out of it.

Any simple claim that you need religion to be good is flat wrong.

Atheists are pious people.

I don't believe in God. I do believe in Judaism. I believe in ethics, morals.

Basic religion is the reason we have morals.

Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was always in the right.

I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.

Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!

Lincoln said you cannot be President without spending some item on your knees. I have repeated that and a bunch of Atheists got all over me. Wait a minute. Does that mean that you cannot be President if you are an Atheist? I say yea that does mean that.

People who don't believe in God may have their own way of justifying some bad act they have committed.

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it

There's been so much rhetoric in the past decade about how important religion is to being a good person, for people to say they don't believe in God.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn't exactly selling general morality or atheism short.

A little Religion, and a little Honesty, goes a great way in Courts.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

If thou beest ever so exact in thy morals, and not a worshiper of God, then thou art an atheist.

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.