quotations about religion
Most of us make an eight-day clock of our religion: we wind it up on Sunday morning and pay no heed to it for the rest of the week.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it.
MARK TWAIN
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
None more deceive themselves than they who think their religion is true and genuine, though it refines not their spirits and reforms not their lives.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
To me, it seems that mankind can never achieve its highest potentialities till it has thrown off the incubus of historic (and prehistoric) religion.
WILLIAM ARCHER
William Archer as Rationalist: A Collection of His Heterodox Writings
Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Culture and Value
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the mad daughter of a wise mother.
VOLTAIRE
Voltaire: Selections
Some have said that the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism illustrates the old maxim that religious freedom is the product of two equally pernicious fanaticisms, each cancelling the other out.
FAREED ZAKARIA
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.
SAM HARRIS
Letter to a Christian Nation
A religion which requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation.
HOSEA BALLOU
Edge-Tools of Speech
I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith -- it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
SIGMUND FREUD
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
letter to unknown recipient, December 13, 1757
A religion that is small enough for us to understand would not be large enough for our needs.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Religion, charity, pure benevolence, and morals, mingled up with superstitious rites and ferocious cruelty, form in their combination institutions the most powerful and the most pernicious that have ever afflicted mankind.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, November 22, 1831
Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
Some men want to have religion like a dark lantern, and carry it in their pocket, where nobody but themselves can get any good from it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward -- and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.
MARTIN AMIS
"The Voice of the Lonely Crowd", The Guardian, June 1, 2002
Religion of your upbringing is like a cloak -- you must know how it is made in order to take it off.
BABA HARI DASS
The Yellow Book
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Men think religion bears the same relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it--beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts