Never be angry with your neighbor because his religious views differ from your own; for all the branches of a tree to not lean the same way.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Urn Burial
One religion is as true as another.
ROBERT BURTON, Anatomy of Melancholy
- I count religion but a childish toy,
- And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta
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
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
KARL MARX, Criticism of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"
Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.
ARTHUR MILLER, The Crucible
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result.
THICH NHAT HANH, Living Buddha, Living Christ
Science and Religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.
DAN BROWN, Angels & Demons
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on Virginia
It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow.
CALVIN COOLIDGE, speech, Jul. 6, 1922
When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly.
SUE MONK KIDD, When the Heart Waits
Religion, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing.
ECKHART TOLLE, A New Earth
Perhaps no one religion contains all the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Brisingr
The only consistent purpose of human religion was as a cover for the most bestial excesses of mass homicide, torment, and atrocity.
Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed.
DAN BROWN, Angels & Demons
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
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
God has no religion.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS, Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right things--it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with math'matics--a man may be able to work problems straight off in's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.
Sauce maketh palatable the dish of the epicure; even so doth religion sweeten the bitter cup of adversity to the Christian.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
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 accomodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it.
MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks ... rulers have had the various pantheons carrying water for them since the first con man met the first sucker, and priestcraft was born. That was long enough ago that they were probably both walking on their knuckles.
S. M. STIRLING, The Sunrise Lands
I'm more spiritual than I am religious. I don't go to church; I go to the beach.
PAULA DEEN, Good Housekeeping, Nov. 2009
- Religion, like all things, begins with self,
- And naught is known, until one knows himself.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Veritas Vincit"
Religion is a sovereign balm to the penitent; but burning coals to the scoffer.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
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