What they said about religion.

“Religion poisons everything.”

“Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion.”

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.”

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.”

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”

“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”

“If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures.”

“Science is not a perfect instrument, but it is a self-correcting one. When it goes wrong, it has methods for detecting that it has gone wrong.”

“I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.”

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky, who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And he has a list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke forever and ever — but he loves you.”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

“It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me. It's the parts I do understand.”

“Faith is believing what you know ain't so.”