“To whose guidance shall I submit my mind? Must I be a Christian, because I happened to be born in London, or in Madrid? Must I be a Mussulman, because I was born in Turkey? As it is myself alone that I ought to consult, the choice of a religion is my greatest interest. One man adores god by Mahomet, another by the Grand Lama, and another by the Pope. Weak and foolish men? adore god by your own reason. The stupid indolence which takes possession of the generality of men, and sets aside this most important of all concerns, seems to intimate to us that they are nothing but stupid machines, endowed with animal functions, whose instinct never occupies itself beyond the present moment. We make use of our understandings in the same way as we use our bodies; both are frequently abandoned to quacks, whose chief concern
is to get possession of our money.”

“Christianity is founded on Judaism; let us, then, examine if Judaism be the work of god. The books of Moses are handed to me, and the first point I have to ascertain is, whether or not these books were actually written by Moses. In the first place – Is it possible that Moses could have engraven the Pentateuch, or the books of the law, on stone, and that he found engravers and stone-cutters in a frightful wilderness, where it is said, that his people had neither tailors, shoemakers, raiment, nor bread, and where god was compelled to work a continued miracle, for the space of forty years, in order to clothe and feed them ?”

“The church of the country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. For my part, I would say, ‘welcome infidelity!’, ‘Welcome atheists!’, ‘Welcome anything!’, in preference to the gospel, as preached by these divines. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke have together done.”

— Frederick Douglass (1852), cited by Jennifer Hecht (2003) in Doubt: a History (pg. 418)

“The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.”

— Lord Bolingbroke (c.1730) (Ѻ)

“The tables of natural laws are so obvious that no man who is able to read the plainest character can mistake them, and therefore no political society ever framed a system of law in direct and avowed contradiction of them.”

— Lord Bolingbroke (c.1730), Publication; cited by Arthur Lovejoy (1933) in The Great Chain of Being (pg. 290)