George Orwell Quotes

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

You can be a virtuous person without faith in God.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

I'm conservative on some issues, and I'm progressive on others.

I think I like big issues, but I don't believe in God or religion.

Humanists are not characteristically strong in faith, hope and love.

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It's the absence of religion, and that's a wonderful thing.

Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.

I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal.

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

Liberalism is but childishness, which is easily brought to reason; but revolution is a force, and one must know how to use it.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.

A good deal of the political battle of the future will be a conflict between religion and unbelief:

Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in God is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality. Atheism alone is the surest way to morality.

I personally believe that our planet would be absolutely fine without religion, and I also feel we are evolving in that direction.

I gave up religious thinking a long time ago and am really just an agnostic now.

Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.

Religion is defined as belief in and worship of a controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they can't stand the competition.

I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.

This crusade to separate church and state is only one expression of my raison d'être. I'm an atheist, but I'm also an anarchist, and a feminist, and an integrationist.