“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.”

If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. … Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.

It was the atheist Benito Juárez who said, “Among individuals, as among nations, peace is the respect of others' rights."

After the fall of Napoleon, the Roman Catholic Church, with whom Fourier was never reconciled, saw to his persecution.

“Bigger things than the state will fall ... all religion will fall,” wrote Ibsen. His play, “The Emperor and the Galilean,” shows the superiority of paganism to Christianity.

He either believed all religions or none of them. He did not believe in a future life. A fairer estimate of Burton's religion might be that he was an Agnostic.

Said Madison, “Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator… can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”