John Adams Quotes

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.

In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.

Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.

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

I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

Where you have no religion, you are sure to have no government, for as religion disappears, anarchy takes place and fixes a compleat Hell on earth till religion returns.

Disbelievers cause confusion and corruption in the land.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell.

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves.

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

I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.

Freedom of religion has been replaced by freedom from religion.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

I certainly don’t believe in religion, although I find it fascinating that it’s become so powerful in the world and it’s kind of dictated morals down through societies for thousands of years, but I don’t see the hand of God at work in the world anywhere.

I am without religious feeling.

I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people.

Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.

When men live as if there were no God, it becomes expedient for them that there should be none.

Without religion the highest endowments of intellect can only render the possessor more dangerous if he be ill disposed; if well disposed, only more unhappy.

I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on."

I don’t approve of religion.

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

It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.