Unforgivable Sentences
Quotes by critics of Islam
In much of the Muslim world, each sentence on this page could earn its author a sentence of another kind: prison, the lash or death. In nine countries, leaving Islam can still be punished by death, and blasphemy laws take care of the rest. In the West, the sentence is handed down by others: death threats, police protection, cancelled lectures and, now and then, a knife on stage.
Their authors are ex-Muslims, dissident believers, writers, scholars and activists. Some were born into the faith and walked out of it; others never needed to step inside to read it. They share a refusal to be afraid, and a knack for saying in one line what a thousand sermons work hard to hide.
An idea that needs the death penalty to protect itself has already confessed its weakness. These sentences simply say it out loud. Read them, quote them, share them: where you live, it is probably still allowed. For the other side of the story, see Clerical Errors, where the clergy speaks for itself.
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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you accept atrocities, and commit them.
Adaptation of a quote by Voltaire -
Only weak ideas need to shield themselves by erecting a high wall of intimidation.
Hamed Abdel-Samad -
If a community is not accepted, it is because it does not produce good outcomes; otherwise, it is welcomed without issue.
Charles de Gaulle -
Everywhere in the world where Islam is absent, the risk of jihad is non-existent.
Majid Oukacha -
The France of the Enlightenment cannot tolerate obscurantism shaking the flame of the secular Republic.
Tribute to Samuel Paty -
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.Richard Dawkins -
Glory to those who, having no sacred ideal, simply strive not to bother their neighbors too much.
Georges Brassens -
You are walking backward through history, bowing under the clerical yoke!
Sarah Bernhardt -
Killing a man is not defending a doctrine; it is killing a man.
Sébastien Castellion -
Religion is a true breeding ground for fanatics: it is truly the stage on which they best play their roles.
Jean Meslier -
If one prefers life to death, one must choose civilization over barbarism. Islamism is the most stagnant and stubborn cult; the Quran halts all science and culture. The Mohammedan reads nothing, because everything not found in the Quran is deemed bad and it encompasses everything.
Alfred de Vigny -
The Quran, that wicked book, was enough to found a great religion and to satisfy the metaphysical needs of several million men for 1,200 years; it provided a foundation for their morality [...] Yet in it, we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. I could not find even a single idea that was remotely profound in it.
Arthur Schopenhauer -
Islam! This monstrous religion's only reason is its ignorance, its only persuasion is its violence and tyranny, and its only miracle is its weapons that make the world tremble and forcibly reestablish Satan's empire throughout the universe.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet -
One cannot insult, attack, or kill simply because they disagree with someone else. It is unthinkable, it doesn't exist, it's not acceptable. You can express your dissatisfaction, you can disagree and voice it passionately, but you cannot attack, you cannot insult, you cannot kill because of it.
Djamel Debouzze -
We will be saved the day we understand that we are better served by the humanity within people than by any supposed divinity they might carry inside them.
Aldo Sterone -
Only strong minds can look death in the eye, knowing that it will take away everything they are.
Michel Onfray -
It is a misfortune for human nature when religion is established by a conqueror. The Mohammedan religion,
which speaks only of the sword, continues to act upon men with the destructive spirit that founded it.Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu -
All the seeds of social destruction are in the religion of Mohammed
François-René de Chateaubriand -
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
Albert Einstein -
The great phenomenon of our time is the violence of the Islamic surge. Underestimated by most of our contemporaries, this rise of Islam is analogously comparable to the beginnings of communism in Lenin's time.
The consequences of this phenomenon are still unpredictable. The Western world hardly seems prepared to face the problem of Islam. Currently, it is too late.André Malraux
