Atheism, the absence of belief in gods, is a comparatively late phenomenon in history.

It is not, after all, so very hard to acquire a fortune; the real difficulty is to deserve one.

Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even today it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing that man will civilise.

Worship God. It’s easier than thinking.

It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... There is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world.

Persecution is the compliment paid by a threatened lie to a conquering truth.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.