Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the Perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of non-being. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in non-being, then God is non-being. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticisms of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
The most preposterous notion that homosapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough For Love, 1973
Human beings in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of a lower moral quality than their own. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native 1878
I have been looking for God for fifty years and I think if He had existed I should have discovered Him. Thomas Hardy
I haven’t rejected god; I’ve never met him. Trevor Hick alt.atheism
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world. Georges Duhamel, 1884-1966, French novelist
I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds. Quentin Crisp
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe? Quentin Crisp, attributions & variations
You found God? If nobody claims him in thirty days, he’s yours! Author unknown
It’s because I take you seriously that I can’t bring myself to believe in you. Julia Sweeney, Letting Go of God
All societies have had need to find an explanation of the way in which human beings came into the world. David Attenborough, televised interview
I can’t believe that each species was brought into existence by a merciful God who cares about human beings. ibid.
I can’t believe that God created parasites in order to torture small children. ibid.
I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, ‘Well, it’s funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses.’ But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he’s five years old. And I reply and say, ‘Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well.’ And now I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing. David Attenborough, Life on Air, BBC 2002
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. Thomas Nagel
You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates the same people you do. Annie Lamott
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. Delos B McKown
As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
God: the most popular scapegoat for our sins. Mark Twain
I am plenty safe enough in his hands; I am not in any danger from that kind of a Deity. The one that I want to keep out of the reach of, is the caricature of him which one finds in the Bible. We (that one and I) could never respect each other, never get along together. I have met his superior a hundred times – in fact I amount to that myself. Mark Twain letter to Olivia Clemens 17th July 1889
Man proposes, but God blocks the game. Mark Twain, notebook
If God is what people say, there can be no-one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries – and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, ‘as unhappy as God’. ibid. 24 April to August 1885
If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. He would not stoop to ask for any man’s compliments, praises, flatteries; and He would be far above exacting them. I would have Him as self-respecting as the better sort of man in these regards.
He would not be a merchant, a trader. He would not buy these things. He would not sell, or offer to sell, temporary benefits of the joys of eternity for the product called worship. I would have Him as dignified as the better sort of man in this regard.
He would value no love but the love born of kindnesses conferred; not that born of benevolences contracted for. Repentance in a man’s heart for a wrong done would cancel and annul that sin; and no verbal prayers for forgiveness be required or desired or expected of that man.
In His Bible there would be no Unforgiveable Sin. He would recognize in Himself the Author and Inventor of Sin and Author and Inventor of the Vehicle and Appliances for its commission; and would place the whole responsibility where it would of right belong: upon Himself, the only Sinner.
He would not be a jealous God – a trait so small that even men despise it in each other.
He would not boast.
He would keep private Hs admirations of Himself; He would regard self-praise as unbecoming the dignity of his position.
He would not have the spirit of vengeance in His heart. Then it would not issue from His lips.
There would not be any hell – except the one we live in from the cradle to the grave.
There would not be any heaven – the kind described in the world’s Bibles.
He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when he could have made him happy with the same effort and he would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy. ibid.
God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. ibid. 1898
What God lacks is convictions – stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something – not try to be everything. ibid. 1898
No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next. Mark Twain, A Biography
To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master. ibid.
... a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell – mouths mercy, and invented hell – mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! Mark Twain, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
The motto stated a lie. If this nation has ever trusted in God, that time has gone by; for nearly half a century almost its entire trust has been in the Republican party and the dollar – mainly the dollar. I recognize that I am only making an assertion and furnishing no proof; I am sorry, but this is a habit of mine; sorry also that I am not alone in it; everybody seems to have this disease. Mark Twain in Eruption