quotations about religion
Religion & Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
JAMES MADISON
letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822
The downtrodden are more religious than the satisfied.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of [another].
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
A City Set on a Hill
Religion is the whole soul marching heavenward to the music of joy and love, with well-ranked faculties, every one of them beating time and keeping tune.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
He had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the native trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic venues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
Every religious revolution has been the struggle of thought to gain another step in the ladder that reaches to heaven.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Christianity
True religion consists not only in feelings towards God, but also in duties towards men.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Over the years my religion has changed and my spirituality has evolved. Religion and spirituality are very different, but people often confuse the two. Some things cannot be taught, but they can be awakened in the heart. Spirituality is recognizing the divine light that is within us all. It doesn't belong to any particular religion; it belongs to everyone.
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Soul of a Butterfly
If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose.
SRI AUROBINDO
The Uttarpara Address, May 30, 1909
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.
H. L. MENCKEN
Minority Report
No religion is better than an unnatural one.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
To ordinary human beings, finally--the vast majority who exist for service and the general advantage, and who may exist only for that--religion gives in inestimable contentment with their situation and type, manifold peace of heart, an ennobling of obedience, one further happiness and sorrow with their peers and something transfiguring and beautifying, something of a justification for the whole everyday character, the whole lowliness, the whole half-brutish poverty of their souls. Religion and religious significance spread the splendor of the sun over such ever-toiling human beings and make their own sight tolerable to them.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Is There a God?", The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell
It is needless to say that a religion which declares war against the fundamental instincts of human nature must always fail, equally on the one side in regulating the passions of the thoughtless many, and on the other in commanding the suffrages of the thoughtful few.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Religion must be a punishment, because nobody gets religion who does not have a bad conscience.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
attributed, Prophets of Dissent
Religion, like the law of gravity, binds each element of our nature to its own orbit. It gives the peace of a harmonious character, where the moral and intellectual powers hold their lawful spheres, and the appetites fill their restricted place, and the law of purity and holiness reigns supreme.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
In a world so empty of human life, there was comfort in the thought that an invisible realm of spirits was aware of their existence, cared about their actions, and perhaps directed their steps. Even a stern or inimical spirit who cared enough to demand certain actions of appeasement was better than the heartless disregard of a harsh and indifferent world, in which their lives were entirely in their own hands, with no one else to turn to in time of need, not even in their thoughts.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Plains of Passage
A true religious instinct never deprived man of one single joy; mournful faces and a sombre aspect are the conventional affectations of the weak-minded
HOSEA BALLOU
Treasury of Thought