Quotes otD: Atheists on Faith

[liveonearth]

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge.  It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.  No agnostic has ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
--Daniel J. Boorstin

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it.  The also believed the world was flat.
--Mark Twain

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.  It's nothing to brag about.  And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsesnse that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
--Bill Maher

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
--Kurt Vonnegut

The most costly of all follies it to believe passionately in the palpably not true.
--H.L. Mencken

An agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.
--Studs Terkel

I was raised an atheist.  Every Sunday, we went nowhere.  We prayed for nothing.  And all our prayers were answered.
--Heidi Joyce