The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.