The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.
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.
What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous – if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.
Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers: It is the only prayer that deserves an answer – good, honest, noble work.
There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
I have not the slightest confidence in ‘spiritual manifestations.’
The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.
The more false we destroy, the more room there will be for the true.
I am going to put the Bible out of business.
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart-the best brain.
Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
I believe in the religion of reason – the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.
They say: Belief is important. I say: No, actions are important. Judge by deed, not by creed.
Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.
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.
Do right, not to deny yourself but because you love yourself and because you love others.