Friedrich Nietzsche:

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

Without music, life would be a mistake.

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

Some are born posthumously.

"Faith" means not wanting to know what is true.

Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

I tell you: one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.


Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is God both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

No pleasure is itself a bad thing, but the things that produce some kinds of pleasure, bring along with them unpleasantness that is much greater than the pleasure itself.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience of pleasure as the criterion of every good thing.


Robert Ingersoll:

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences.

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

An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures.

If the book the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?

Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.

Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, — never the correctness of his thought.

Every library is an arsenal.


Richard Dawkins:

You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of God?

Science is the poetry of reality.


Christopher Hitchens:

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven-except as a place of either wordly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.

Religion has run out of justifications.


Sam Harris:

By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.