O Me Of Little Faith*: Ten Quotes On Atheism

This is something I've been wanting to do for a while now.  Here is the first list of favorite atheist quotes.  I hope there will be several of them to come!

Woody Allen:  "To you, I'm an atheist.  To God, I'm the loyal opposition."

Voltaire:  "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

Napoleon Bonaparte:  "Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.  Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

Mark Twain:  "The Bible has noble poetry in it ... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies."

Dara O' Briain:  "Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop.  But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you."

John Fante:  "Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche??"

Bertrand Russell:  "It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age, but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."

Philip Appleman:  "Heaven:  The big Apartheid in the sky."

Christopher Hitchens:  "There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret.  To this I reply:  Who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-drime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died?  How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis."

and finally, my personal favorite from this list:

Peter O'Toole:  "One day when I was praying, it suddenly occurred to me that I was talking to myself."

[*This entry's title made with apologies to Lewis Black, whose O Me Of Little Faith is one of the funniest books you will ever read.]