Twenty Atheist Quotes from Some Surprising Historical Figures

Atheists and agnostics can never win. Some religious fundamentalists say atheists were put on the Earth by the Devil to challenge the faith of believers while agnostics are often labeled as being just plain lazy, as in not wanting to do the hard research to make up their minds either way. Believe what you will, but some of the world's most influential people have been atheist or agnostic and some of these names might shock you. Here are twenty quotes from some of history's greatest thinkers.

1. "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." - Ferdinand Magellan

2. "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." - Abraham Lincoln

3. "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

4. "Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis." - Sigmund Freud

5. "There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end." - Helen Keller

6. "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - Gene Roddenberry

7."A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows." - Samuel Clemens

8. "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." - Albert Einstein

9. "It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so." - Ernestine Rose

10. "All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemingway

11. "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins