The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
-- Thomas Paine

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
-- Annie Dillard

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
-- Charles Dickens

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-- Philip K. Dick

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings
-- Heinrich Heine (1821)

"All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus,"
-- Sam Brownback's stump speech in Iowa.

"Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money."
-- Leon Lederman

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
-- Galileo Galilei