RELIGION QUOTES VI
quotations about religion
Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Man must & will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan & will erect the synagogue of Satan.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Jerusalem
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but--live for it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.
EUGENE IONESCO
Rhinoceros
It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
Some Mistakes of Moses
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Future of an Illusion
It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them--and what God wants them to do to each other.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
The New Revelations: A Conversation with God
If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence ... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.
GLEN COOK
The White Rose
Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Timothy Leary's Last Trip
A man has no more religion than he acts out in his life.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Americans like to believe in miracles, they like to believe in magic and when they consume religion it's not on a philosophical level, it's on a miraculous level. Jesus can do things for you. It's about goods.
FRANK ZAPPA
Spin Magazine, July 1991
The evangelists' success points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them.
BARACK OBAMA
The Audacity of Hope
The priests of the different religious sects ... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
attributed, The God Delusion
There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed; to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?
WILLIAM GIBSON
No Maps for These Territories
Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed.
DAN BROWN
Angels & Demons
Without religion no man can soar.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful