Joseph McCabe quotes:

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

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

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

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

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.

The Rationalist case needs no straining of evidence and always gains by the severest self-criticism.

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

The Papacy was corrupt for whole centuries: especially from about 880 to 1050 and (with a short decent pontificate at rare intervals) 1290 to about 1660. No 'primacy' in any other organized religion has so disgraceful a record.

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.

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

I took a sheet of paper, divided it into debt and credit columns on the arguments for and against God and immortality. On Christmas Eve I wrote 'bankrupt' at the foot. And it was on Christmas morning 1895, after I had celebrated three Masses, while the bells of the parish church were ringing out the Christmas message of peace, that, with great pain, I found myself far out from the familiar land--homeless, aimlessly drifting. But the bells were right after all; from that hour on I have been wholly free from the nightmare of doubt that had lain on me for ten years.

If, it was natural to reason, God punishes men with eternal torment, it is surely lawful for men to use doses of it in a good cause.

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.

... the absence of theistic belief.

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

No pope ever condemned slavery.

Not material or economic conditions in the ordinary sense, but perverse religious ideas explain the suspension of civilization in Europe from the 5th to the 12th century, and in the Mohammedan world after the 15th century.