Famous Freethinkers

Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. John Adams U.S. President

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows.

I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me.

Thomas Paine: Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true.

Jodi Foster: How could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we don't know any better.

Langston Hughes: Listen, Christ, You did alright in your day, I reckon-- but that day's gone now. They ghosted you up a swell story, too, called it Bible-- But it's dead now. The popes and the preachers've made too much money from it. They've sold you to too many.

George Clooney: I don't believe in heaven and hell. I don't know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life--the only thing I know to exist--to be wasted.

Frederick Douglass: I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

Harrison Ford: My parents did not practice any organized religion, although my father was raised Roman Catholic and my mother was Jewish. But there was always an ethical context to our lives, a very strong notion of individual moral responsibility.

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States: When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion.

Sam Harris: The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

Alice Walker: What a burden to think one is conceived in sin rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into joy. . . It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.

Einstein: I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.

Natalie Portman: I'm an agnostic which basically mean I make up my own religion and dogma. I get joy and satisfaction out of making other people happy or by just doing something for someone else.

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws.

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States: Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the Church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

If I thought the Jews killed god, I'd worship the Jews

Robert Ingersoll: Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.