Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

Secularism is a religion, a religion that is understood. It has no mysteries, no mumblings, no priests, no ceremonies, no falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.

The myth of hell represents all the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.

The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

It would seem that unless we see through and beyond the physical, we shall not even see the physical as we ought to see it: as the very vehicle for the glory of God

On some deep, unconscious level, he had always known it to be true. He was an invention, a fictional character. Jacob Lightfoot didn't exist.

We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they hadimposed upon us.

The private sector is motivated by profit and efficiency and the US government often is not.

Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data.

We do not understand the intricate pattern of the stars in their courses, but we know that He who created them does, and that just as surely as He guides them, He is charting a safe course for us.

I keep thinking how young can you die from old age

You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybody's rights. That these rights are not divisible - not something men have and women don't and so on.

When all of earth turns against you, all of heaven turns toward you.