Quotes by Joseph McCabe

A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts - a bundle of facts. Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the law because they act in that way.

An idea or institution may arise for one reason and be maintained for quite a different reason.

Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power.

Creeds made in Dark Ages are like drawings made in dark rooms.

Given the conditions for the operation of the historic law - freedom and knowledge - Atheism will in this century be the common attitude of civilized people. Non-Christians are the great majority in every free country today. Atheists number tens of millions, quite apart from Communist activity, in such countries.

Hitler is a rotten speaker: raucous in voice, graceless in gesture, and loose in the composition of his speeches. It is not personal magnetism that makes him a power with the young -- the older are mostly driven to his gatherings -- but a belief in his genius that is artificially created by years of the most elaborate and most persistent boosting.

I AM what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three years, I find, I was defending the rights of women.

If a single one of these gentlemen is correct, if a believer of any type is right, the essential truth for man, the real drama of life, in comparison with which the secular story of the race, is a puppet-show and the unfolding of the universe is a triviality, is the dialogue of the immortal soul and the eternal God. Yet it seems that there is nothing in the world so hard to discover as this. The theory refutes itself.

No pope ever condemned slavery.

The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.

The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth -- Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.

The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.

Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of disorder in the heavens - great catastrophes or conflagrations occur frequently - but evolution gives us a perfectly natural explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer now traces the finger of God in the heavens; and astronomers ought to know best.