#Religion Quotes

“The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.”

“The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.”

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is a fateful fatalistic apathy.”

“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”

“Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.”

“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”

“We can sit here and talk about all the negativity, which we've done a little bit, but for every act of evil in the world, there are a million acts of kindness. Basically, our nature is to love each other and care about each other, and most of us do that. Most of us have no quarrel with anybody who's living on another side of the planet and who might have a different religious persuasion. It's just these small minorities to the far right and the far left who get all of the news time and print space.”

“Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.”

“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.”

“Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.”

“For men were born to pray and save:Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,It's with O'Leary in the grave.”

“Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”

“Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.”

“Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?”

“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”

“Congress is going to start tinkering with the Ten Commandments just as soon as they find someone in Washington who has read them.”

“Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners.”

“It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.”

“No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.”

“Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people, and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools- democracy in all public and private life.”

“Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.”

“Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.”

“Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,--never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping- coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe a cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies.”

“The nation should be ruled by the Ten Commandments.”

“The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.”

“Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.”

“Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.”

“Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.”

“The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.”

“Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.”

“No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with the gratitude to the Giver of good who has blessed us.”

“The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.”

“It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.”

“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.”

“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.”

“He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too.”

“More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.”

“Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home, including Palestine, not by aggression but by loving service”

“The Governor was strong uponThe Regulation Act:The Doctor said that Death was butA scientific fact:And twice a day the Chaplain called,And left a little tract.”

“Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.”

“I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.”

“You must pay for your sins. If you have already paid, please ignore this notice.”

“We should not permit prayer to be taken out of the schools; that's the only way most of us got through.”

“As for the dinosaur - But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal and America had not then been discovered.”

“Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it.”

“It was the most earnest ambition I ever had....Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.”

“Tolerance is the only thing that will enable persons belonging to different religions to live as good neighbours and friends.”

“All religions teach that two opposite forces act upon us and the human endeavour consists in a series of eternal rejections and acceptances.”

“The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.”