“They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion.”— Christopher Columbus, eada.lib.umd.edu
“Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals….”— Emma Goldman, amazon.com
“This sounds incongruous — yet it may be taken for granted that those who profess to follow Christianity and yet make of God a being malicious, revengeful, and of more evil attributes that they possess themselves — are as barbarous, as unenlightened, as hopelessly sunken in slavish ignorance as the l…”— Marie Corelli, amazon.com
“I don't understand people who are so much afraid of the Lord. They must have done something wrong. If you always do your best, and try to be good, you needn't fear anything. At least, that's my opinion.”— Marie Corelli, amazon.com
“At some point, I had no faith in faith anymore. I had no hope for this dunya (meaning “world”). I did not know how to.”— Huda Hassan, hazlitt.net
“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the ti…”— Harry S Truman, en.wikisource.org
“Perhaps you have felt already, from the tone of my letter, that I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God's natural works. It is reading Him. His will — His…”— Ada Lovelace, en.wikiquote.org
“When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening, I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.”— Fidel Castro, amazon.com
“You know that I spent several years in one of those places [reform school] when I was a boy and the so-called Training that I received while there is mainly the cause of my being the degenerate beast that I am today. I have thought about that system of Training young boys for all of my life and I kn…”— Carl Panzram, amazon.com
“We all know that any emotional bias—irrespective of truth or falsity—can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value....If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their yo…”— H. P. Lovecraft, amazon.com
“My mother and father used to take me to church in Mexico and Texas, were I used to live. The huge figures of saints and crucifixions. Religion played a big role in my life.”— Richard Ramirez, evilminds.tumblr.com
“Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifes…”— John Muir, amazon.com
“The father and mother themselves talk before the children in the most disparaging way about the teacher and the school and they are much more inclined to insult the teachers than to put their offspring across the knee and knock sound reason into him. What the little fellow hears at home does not ten…”— Adolf Hitler, amazon.com
“Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature—and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine—fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the adva…”— Adolf Hitler, amazon.com
“Once a young woman came to Hafiz and said, ‘What is the sign of someone knowing God?’ And Hafiz became very quiet, and stood in silence for nearly a minute... lovingly looking deep into the young woman's eye, then softly spoke, ‘My dear, they have dropped the knife. The person who knows God has drop…”— Hafiz of Persia, bbc.com
“The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade he…”— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, amazon.com
“Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith―acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors ar…”— Dan Brown, amazon.com
“Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”— Dan Brown, amazon.com
“What was missing in all of them, he thought, was a recognition of Africans as people with projects—lives they were leading, aspirations they were striving for—and a rich existing culture, exemplified in the proverbs and the religious traditions that are threaded through these novels. He was writing,…”— Chinua Achebe, amazon.com
“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”— Chinua Achebe, amazon.com