We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it

It takes great faith to have no faith.

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

To attain the truth in life, we must discard all the ideas we were taught.

Man must smash to bits his stolen, contrived Christian faith through powerful, enormous suffering of the heart, through an amazement that cannot be rejected. Through this, man becomes very small and despicable in his own eyes.

No faith can possibly suffice. It’s always undermined by ignorance.

For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

It is time to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term “person of faith” as a compliment.