Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Religion.
I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Salman Rushdie
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.
The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship.
Sophia Lyon Fahs, Today's Childr
The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.
H. L. Mencken, Minority Report,
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason1.htm
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason,
I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized, on this earth, capable of becoming true man, 'master of his fate and captain of his soul'.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of all men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.
George MacDonald
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.
Henry Fielding
All orthodox opinion -- that is, today, revolutionary opinion either of the pure or the impure variety -- is anti-man.
Percy Wynham Lewis
There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them.
Michael Moore
The Pope? How many divisions has he got?
Josef Stalin
The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Interpretation
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
What is a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.
Robert Altman
Religion is just mind control.
George Carlin
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
Thomas Jefferson
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
Voltaire
