Had a look around but couldn't find a quote thread.

Its been said that:

 "....the wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved in quotations"

Heres some interesting ones made by prominent freethinkers,deists and atheists down the ages (please feel free to add any) :

“The supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy … would look up at the sky and declare, ‘It was all made just so that I could exist!’”
Physicist Peter Walker

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin
 

"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window".
Stephen King
 

"There is in every village a torch-the teacher:and an extinguisher-the clergyman" 

Victor Hugo

 

The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.
Emmet F. Fields
 

Nature wants us to enjoy life to the full and die without giving it a second thought; Christianity wants the opposite.
Sainte-Beuve,Les Cahiers.


Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
Lemuel K. Washburn.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan

"Religions are like farts.Yours is good but everyone else's stinks"
Picket fences
 

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken


"Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.”
Lemuel K. Washburn

"When the churches literally ruled society, the human drama encompassed: (a) slavery; (b) the cruel subjection of women;(c)the most savage forms of legal punishment; (d) the absurd belief that kings ruled by divine right; (e) the daily imposition of physical abuse; (f) cold heartlessness for the sufferings of the poor; as well as (g) assorted pogroms ('ethnic cleansing' wars) between rival religions, capital punishment for literally hundreds of offenses, and countless other daily imposed moral outrages. . . . It was the free-thinking, challenging work by people of conscience, who almost invariably had to defy the religious and political status quo of their times, that brought us out of such darkness."

Steve Allen
 

“The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.”
Thomas Payne
 

For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said "Think" The many have said "Believe!"-

Robert Ingersoll

 

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell
 

"The bible is a blueprint of in-group morality,complete with instructions for genocide,enslavement of out groups,and world domination.
But the bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder,cruelty and rape.
Many ancient works do that-the Iliad, the Icelandic sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans,for example.
But noone is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality.
Therein lies the problem."
John Hartung

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.
Mark Twain
 

"The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born."
Mark Twain

 
 
"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry."
Mark Twain

  
 
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons,
sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky,
people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive
stories, and you say that WE are the ones that need help?
 Mark Twain
 

To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God.
Victor Hugo