ANAIS NIN:
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
ANNIE DILLARD:
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
ALBERT EINSTEIN:
I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.
True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.
Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm, value judgments remain indispensable. Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human thought and actions; it is not qualified to speak of real facts and the relationships between them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY:
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE:
Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.
BERTRAND RUSSELL:
In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. "What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong?" she asked. "I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say?" Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, "Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'"
Al Seckel, in Preface to Bertrand Russell on God and Religion
BILL GATES:
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
BLAISE PASCAL:
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
CARL SANDBURG:
In due time Cartwright said, "All who desire to lead a new life, to give their hearts to God, and go to heaven, will stand," and a sprinkling of men, women, and children stood up. Then the preacher exhorted, "All who do not wish to go to hell will stand." All stood up — except Lincoln. Then said Cartwright in his gravest voice, "I observe that many responded to the first invitation to give their hearts to God and go to heaven. And I further observe that all of you save one indicated that you did not desire to go to hell. The sole exception is Mr. Lincoln, who did not respond to either invitation. May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where are you going?"
And Lincoln slowly rose and slowly spoke. "I came here as a respectful listener. I did not know that I was to be singled out by Brother Cartwright. I believe in treating religious matters with due solemnity. I admit that the questions propounded by Brother Cartwright are of great importance. I did not feel called upon to answer as the rest did. Brother Cartwright asks me directly where I am going. I desire to reply with equal directness: I am going to Congress."
He went.
CLARENCE DARROW:
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.
Scopes trial, Dayton, Tennessee, July 13, 1925
DON HIRSCHBERG:
FORREST CHURCH:
Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.
FRANCIS WRIGHT:
Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it
FREDERICK DOUGLASS:
The church of this 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 atheism! 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 put together have done.
G GAIA:
The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.
GALILEO GALILEI:
I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW:
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
H. L. MENCKEN:
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
IMMANUEL KANT:
Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.
JAMES FEIBLEMAN:
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY:
The difficulty with pragmatic arguments for a religion is that truths do not always "work", and beliefs that "work" are by no means always true.
JONATHAN SWIFT:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.
LEO TOLSTOY:
Only greatly insolent people establish a religious law which is to be taken for granted by others, which should be accepted by everyone on faith, without any discussion or doubts. Why must people do this?
LIZETTE W. REESE:
The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly truth comes by and blows them out.
MARK TWAIN:
Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. --Autobiography, 1959
All generalizations are false, including this one.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
HILLBILLY PHILOSOPHER:
The truth is easily perceived when not hidden by the blinders of beliefs.
All human perception exists within the framework of fear and love.
People are like plants; if they aren't growing, they're dying.
PAUL RICOEUR:
To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON:
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON:
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL:
Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
ROBERT HEINLEIN:
One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.
SENECA THE YOUNGER:
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
SIGMUND FREUD:
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
SIR JULIAN HUXLEY:
Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place. --The New Divinity
SUSAN B. ANTHONY:
I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.
T. S. ELIOT:
Any religion...is for ever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion. --Selected Essays, 1927
TENZIN GYATSO, 14TH DALAI LAMA:
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.
THEODORE DREISER:
If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
THOMAS HOBBES:
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion. --Leviathan
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
VOLTAIRE:
If God did not exist it would be necessary for us to invent Him. [I don't personally agree with this but I love the quote and I think it says something about us.]
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR:
Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him.
WILLIAM HAZLITT:
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretences to both.
WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH:
Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.
YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI:
But theological change happens through selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.
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