“I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim…There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”
- Bob Kerrey
“… I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for [Jerry Falwell] to go to…The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend…People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup….He was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud. And I think, if he read the Bible at all - and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book of — at all — that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way.”
- Christopher Hitchens
“[Religion is] violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
- Christopher Hitchens
“I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”
- Philip Pullman , 2001
“My books are about killing God.”
- Philip Pullman
“Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it is a serious contender. Even so it could be justified, if only its claims were true. Even so it could be justified, if only its claims were true. But they are undermined by science and reason. Imagine a world where nobody is intimidated against following reason, wherever it leads.”
- Richard Dawkins
“The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, and proud of it, pretty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist.”
- Richard Dawkins
“Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable falsehoods. It’s time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation. Isn’t it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with its parents’ religion?”
- Richard Dawkins
“I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.”
- Richard Dawkins
“Catholicism is a very masochistic religion . . . there are some very beautiful rituals in Catholicism, but there is a certain darkness within it. It’s not a very loving religion. It’s not very flexible. It doesn’t make room for human error.”
- Madonna