"Civilization will not attain to its perfection," wrote Zola, "until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

Even when they are in the majority, like Christians, they use a tactic of playing victim, set upon by the tiny voices of Freethinkers and other religious dissenters.

“We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.”

“I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us.”

Descartes reasoned from the principle that nothing can be believed to be true until it is evidently true. The only assumption he would allow was his own existence: I think, therefore I am.

Anesthesia was denounced from pulpits across the land as impious and contrary to Holy Writ - until Queen Victoria needed to use it.

“Is it not a fact that in the very countries in which the Church holds an undisputed sway and no freedom of thought is tolerated, a very much lower standard of morality prevails?”

Socialists had a sort of religion to begin with. “Have we not that which forms the strength of religion,” Liebknecht pointed out, “faith in the highest ideals?”

"Paradise is one of the crass fictions invented by high-priests and fathers of the Church, a fiction whose purpose is to requite the hellish torments of people on earth with the soap-bubble of a hope of peace in another place."

“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.”