Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Arthur Alfred Lynch

The only atheism is the denial of truth.

Atheism | Truth | Wisdom |

John Koster

Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.

Atheism | History | Machines | Man | Men | Need | People | Thinking | Universe | Learn | Think |

Simone Weil

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

Atheism | Consolation | Faith | Religion | Right | Sense |

Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Theology is an incubus that a humanist can never shake off. He may seek refuge from theism in atheism or from animism in materialism. But after each desperate twist and turn he will find himself committed to some theological position or other. Theology is inescapable, and it is dynamite.

Atheism | Materialism | Position | Theology | Will |

Denis Diderot

I maintain that superstition is more hurtful to God than atheism is.

Atheism | God | Superstition | God |

George Herbert

The Devil divides the word between Atheism and Superstition.

Atheism | Devil | Superstition |

Joseph Addison

To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Atheism | Faith | Receive | Truths |

Wilhelm Stekel

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.

Atheism | Religion |

Edmund (Louis Antoine Huot) de Goncourt (1822-1896) and Jules (Alfred Huot) de Goncourt

If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.

Atheism | Insult | Insult |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

I shall quite briefly mention here the notorious atheism of science. The theists reproach it for this again and again. Unjustly. A personal God can not be encountered in a world picture that becomes accessible only at the price that everything personal is excluded from it... We know that whenever God is experienced, it is an experience exactly as real as a direct sense impression, as real as one’s own personality. As such He must be missing from the space-time picture. ‘I do not meet with God in space and time’, so says the honest scientific thinker, and for that reason he is reproached by those in whose catechism it is nevertheless stated: ‘God is Spirit’.

Atheism | Experience | God | Price | Reason | Sense | Space | World | God |

Herman Wouk

Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.

Atheism | Belief | Comfort | God | Man | People | Position | God |

James Luther Adams

A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgement upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.

Atheism | Critic | God | Good | God |

Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt

If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.

Atheism | Insult | Insult |

Kenneth Ring

Regardless of their prior attitudes [on near death experience] - whether skeptical or deeply religious - and regardless of the many variations in religious beliefs and degrees of skepticism from tolerant disbelief to outspoken atheism - most of these people were convinced that they had been in the presence of some supreme and loving power and had a glimpse of a life yet to come.

Atheism | Death | Disbelief | Life | Life | People | Power | Skepticism |

Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism - at least in the sense of this work - is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

Atheism | Divinity | Intention | Nothing | Religion | Sense | Truth | Work |

Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

I advise you to guard against atheism and materialism. The biggest blunder made by Europe was the separation of Church and State. This deprived their culture of moral soul and diverted it to the atheistic materialism.

Atheism | Church | Culture | Soul |