701 RECORDS FOUND
"Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race."
"Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken."
"Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism."
"Religion is the idol of the mob it adores everything it does not understand."
"When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied."
"I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore."
"The advent of a new religion, making serious and impressive claims to embody a new revelation from on high, is not a frequent occurrence."
"I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade."
"I have a strong belief in God... I find religion to be a very personal thing... I am also very spiritual."
"They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion, and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms."
"So obviously, any religion embodies some form of rules and expectations for behavior, and even sometimes consequences, and they don't want to hear any of that."
"For if the honour paid to Him is shared by others, He altogether ceases to be worshipped, since His religion requires us to believe that He is the one and only God."
"The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising."
"And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs."
"Modern societies march towards morality in proportion as they leave religion behind."
"Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion."
"I read Christopher McDougall's book 'Born to Run.' If running were a religion, this would be its bible. I actually scribbled my favorite passages on my arm to read during the race."
"The search for religion is the starting point of thought."
"Nations are equal in respect to each other, and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights, whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength or however greatly they may differ in government, religion or manners."
"Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion."
"I just think Texas and that whole Bible Belt section is so, like, corporate. And I don't agree with organized religion in that respect."
"What use is revelation or religion if it doesnt change anything?"
"I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again."
"Neither the wording of the amendment itself nor common practice challenged the widely held belief that government guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."
"The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion."
"I could almost say it is my religion. I guess that sounds pretentious, but I want to live and breathe cinema."
"I'm fascinated with all kinds of religion, but I'm not committed to any specific one."
"When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults."
"I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion."
"I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying ours."
"I think people often come to the synagogue, mosque, the church looking for God, and what we give them is religion."
"The little religion that I have clung to-that what matters most is the continuity of life, and its improvement from one generation to another."
"So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy."
"I am a person whose father had no religion but who went to the nuns for a couple of years. And I think I'm the same: On one hand, I pray on the other hand, I don't believe. I am constantly between the two."
"In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings."
"It doesn't make any difference what religion you are, or how young you are or how old you are-if they go to these abortion mills and stand there and pray-that would make a lot of difference."
"The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."
"The question of religion was a matter for each individual's conscience, and in a great many cases was the outcome of birth or residence in a certain geographical area."
"The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion."
"We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit."
"Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society."
"I don't think you need religion."
"The dissolution of the nation destroys the national religion, and dethrones the national deity."
"Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged."
"Plenty of people are raised Catholic and then aren't Catholic anymore, like any religion."
"In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual."
"But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers."
"In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual."
"Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers."
"In my book I specifically discussed the structural nature of injustice and offered Nine Touchstones of Goddess ethics as an alternative to the Ten Commandments of Biblical religion."
"Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people."
"It's very difficult to talk about religion in Iran because religion has gotten so mixed up with politics."
"There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults."
"We have no problems with Jews and highly respect Judaism as a holy religion."
"The songs keep on writing themselves, and I really love them. It's as close as I get to a religion."
"Buddhism has become a socially recognized religious philosophy for Americans, whereas it used to be considered an exotic religion."
"I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it."
"Politics in America is the binding secular religion."
"It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony."
"I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result."
"Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul - politics does the same thing for the body."
"We need a new religion."
"Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion."
"Christianity is usually called a religion. As a religion it has had a wider geographic spread and is more deeply rooted among more peoples than any other religion in the history of mankind."
"The fundamentalists are increasing. People, afraid to oppose those fundamentalists, shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion, which is the source of fundamentalism."
"The restriction of religion to private life therefore does not necessarily threaten the vital interests of the majority religion, if there is one, and it protects minority religions from tyranny of the majority."
"It was part of your religion to hate the British."
"There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham."
"Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself."
"Scientology is not a white religion. It is not just for white people."
"All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need."
"Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values."
"Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere."
"And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living."
"What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing."
"That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity."
"People don't talk about religion a lot in Hollywood because it's not an incredibly safe place to do it."
"Our nation and those of the developed world must offer our own resistance to despot leaders who seek to commit murder on the basis of religion or race."
"I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation."
"My theory is if you have a religion, it's a good one. Because some people don't have any at all."
"Religion is a strange, wonderful thing. More crimes have been committed in the name of righteousness than any other notion."
"I have my own religion. I'm sort of one-quarter Baptist, one-quarter Catholic, one-quarter Jewish."
"And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point."
"I have a certain pool of subject matter that I like to write about, things that interest me: politics, religion, ecology, and relationships between men and women. And that's usually what I focus on."
"Organized religion provides a model of the way all organizations, from the state down to the village garden club, end a price in terms of a member's freedom of thought and action."
"To reject even one major tenet of the religion or to violate one major rule of behavior is enough to get one kicked out - or worse."
"What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music - participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing."
"Religion is interesting because it brings out the best and the worst in humanity. It can be a source of good deeds, whether it's people from different spiritual backgrounds coming together to help other people in need after a crisis. But it's also a cause for war and bloodshed."
"In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science."
"I think that Sufism fits all over the world. The concept is not anything that fits standard Western ideas - it's always related to culture, to music, to religion. It is a dominant religion in Senegal."
"I'm a modern Muslim. I pray, and if I have a question, I ask someone who is more educated in the religion than me."
"Islam is a peaceful religion."
"Americans should be free to recognize our religious heritage doing that is not the same as creating a government-sponsored religion."
"The courts are using the First Amendment to attack religion, when they should be using it to protect religion."
"I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need."
"Indeed, the acknowledgement of God is not synonymous with religion."
"It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life."
"Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible."
"We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting."
"Growing up in Wales was a pretty Draconian experience with religion."
"Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe."
"The irony of the Supreme Court hearing on these cases last week and of the outright hostility that the Court has displayed against religion in recent years is that above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a concrete display of the Ten Commandments."
"The only difference is that religion is much better organised and has been around much longer, but it's the same story with different characters and different costumes."
"The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct."
"All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs."
"Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any makeup."
"Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose."
"Religion theme aside, most of the time I'm in some sort of comedy and I'm a straight man and it's really just, let's wind this guy up and see him explode."
"I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years."
"The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion."
"The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion."
"To have dominion by religion, is to have dominion over men's souls, thus over their very spiritual life, and to use the Divine things, which are in their religion, as the means."
"I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult."
"Who made these laws? That's what I want to know. So that's why I wear two crosses now. I call it double cross. I believe in God-not religion."
"I could never say that one religion is wrong. I could never say that this person's God is wrong, I could never say that someone is wrong because they don't believe in God."
"I don't think we should proselytize a particular religion."
"Wars have always started over religion."
"There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves."
"When you're in prison, you either embrace religion or you reject it. I embraced it it was a very spiritual time for me."
"I believe every religion captures a piece of the truth."
"The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals."
"The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion."
"In Lincoln's day a President's religion was a very private affair. There were no public prayer meetings, no attempts to woo the Religious Right. Few of Lincoln's countrymen knew anything at all of his religious beliefs."
"My religion lies in my composition."
"I'm still a person, a human being, no matter what religion I am."
"Think about all the great leaders. Think about Obama. Think about Clinton. Think about Nelson Mandela. Think about all the people that we know who are very successful in business, in politics and religion. What are they? They tell purposeful stories. They move people to action by aiming at the heart."
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."
"I don't care what the religion is called as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them."
"Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind."
"I do engineering, not religion."
"The Coptic Church respects the law but it does not accept rulings that go against the Bible and our freedom of religion."
"It is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion."
"History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion."
"Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits."
"Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life."
"I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion."
"I subscribe to no religion. But I believe that in the creation of art, there can be moments of God."
"In every religion there is an element of the supernatural, varying with the influence of pure reason over its devotees."
"The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church."
"When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power."
"Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you'll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It's a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office."
"The Muslims have, as everyone else says, the right to practice their religion and they have the right to construct a mosque at ground zero if they wish. What I am saying, though, is that they should listen to public opinion, they should listen to the deep wounds and anguish that this is causing to so many good people."
"My view of social media is that it is a set of tools, not a religion."
"I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality."
"The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion."
"The world is my country, science is my religion."
"Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are."
"Man is the religious animal. He is the only one that's got true religion, several of them."
"When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies."
"I think that we are at a point in our country where we're trying to decide what role should religion play in the political arena."
"God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress."
"It's not my place to tell you whom to vote for, to take any political stand, to tell you what religion to believe in. I'm an athlete. I can influence certain things, but when I see other athletes and celebrities telling you whom to vote for, I actually get a bit offended."
"The more you get into any religion, it becomes the same. It really becomes how you treat other people and how you get outside yourself. How you look to help other people, and how you get out of this 'I, me, mine' type of thing."
"Oh, there's going to be debate because you're dealing with the Bible and religion is supposed to be separate from state and that to me is already a conflict before it even hits the gay issue."
"No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state."
"What are my sources of strength? My husband and my three kids, my health-care team, and my religion."
"I started listening to and playing other music in the '90s. It was after hearing other bands, like Bad Religion, cover Ramones songs that I started to like our songs again."
"Religion may be defined thus: a belief in, and homage rendered to, existences unseen and causes unknown."
"The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world."
"It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different."
"Religion is a mixed blessing."
"The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion."
"Energy, energy? Energy is, is, it's nothing more than a lot of new age hokum masquerading as religion."
"Billions of people don't practice a religion at all."
"I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth."
"The first act of religion, therefore, concerns those things which are communicated to us from God. The other concerns those things which we yield to God."
"Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations."
"For me sport was a religion... with religious sentiment."
"One's religion is one's own possession and he has a right to it."
"If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England."
"In course of time, religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits, and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears."
"The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it."
"As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism."
"Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself."
"There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world."
"Both of my parents would say they were atheists, so where I inherited my connection to God I don't know. But it's natural. No Bible, no Torah, just the love religion."
"I should like to repeat what I stated recently in the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia: It won't be the religion, but rather the world-view of some of its followers that shall be made current."
"Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography."
"I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion."
"Although religion was around me my whole life I never felt it was forced upon me. It is my centring, my grounding, the soul of me. I feel I'm nothing without it."
"There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God."
"How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence."
"When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe."
"For many people religion can be so easy they stumble right over it."
"The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion."
"Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims."
"I am fascinated with religion or things that people believe in and question that. I think it's interesting."
"I don't feel the need for religion. But I went on a yoga retreat last year and I do believe slightly in the karma thing and just being good and true unto yourself. And I slightly believe that you can attract good and bad to you."
"In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue."
"I think the church and the religion right now have a lot more to be worried about than SLAYER."
"True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion."
"With religion I was always like, 'Does it matter if it's true if it makes you happy?'"
"Kinsey was trying to study sex scientifically, get rid of the overlay of culture and religion."
"Where you have no religion, you are sure to have no government, for as religion disappears, anarchy takes place and fixes a compleat Hell on earth till religion returns."
"If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were."
"All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what's inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn't be able to tell from those X-rays what the person's language or background or race is."
"Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect."
"I found enormous opposition to my religion. It's like if you want to strengthen your biceps, you lift heavy weight, as heavy as you can handle, and work your muscles against resistance until it grows strong. I had to do that with my religion."
"Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils."
"The Lord's prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals."
"To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was."
"Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too."
"Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles."
"And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man."
"If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion."
"I think there's a difference between God and religion."
"The women's movement will present a growing threat to patriarchal religion less by attacking it than by simply leaving it behind."
"Things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade private life."
"One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion."
"I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with."
"There can be no truce between science and religion."
"I took religion much too seriously, however, and its overall effect was depressing. I would have really liked to discard it, but somehow I couldn't."
"I like to say magic is the world's second oldest profession, a mystical and often awe-inspiring spectacle that, throughout the ages, has blended superstition, trickery and religion."
"Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it, so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion."
"It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on."
"Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion."
"It is very reasonable to worry about the harm done by organized religion, and to prefer looser and more private arrangements."
"I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good."
"How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?"
"Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. It's not something that any culture, religion or tradition propagates."
"I am a Westerner. We're not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us, but essentially it's like a mirror, saying, hey, can't you see what's here in your own religion, what are you, stupid?"
"The first guy who came up with the concept of religion was sitting out under a tree. I'm sure of that."
"It's fun being in Islamic countries, to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that."
"Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light."
"You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence."
"No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece."
"People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout."
"Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?"
"I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion, and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people."
"There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be."
"Fashion is almost like a religion, for me at least."
"There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious."
"I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples."
"Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion."
"It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations."
"Religion is the call to confront reality to master the self."
"First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat."
"Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal."
"The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand."
"We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave society devoid of belief."
"I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief."
"The Law of God in the Christian religion is the schoolmaster that leads us to Christ."
"Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion."
"Religion is all-too-often a refuge for scoundrels."
"I know one thing: There are a billion Islamic people in the world today, and there will be about 2 billion by the time we're dead. They're not going to give up their religion."
"Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion."
"Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there."
"Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion."
"Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness."
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."
"Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion."
"Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming."
"Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done."
"The equation of religion with belief is rather recent."
"I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority."
"We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization."
"It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one."
"Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion."
"Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared."
"There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion."
"Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings."
"Diversity of thought and culture and religion and ideas has been the strength of America."
"First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish."
"Religion can be both good and bad - it is spirituality that counts."
"Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion."
"I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life."
"Certain I am, that Christian Religion does no where allow Rebellion."
"I never close a door on any other religion. Most of the time, some part of it makes sense to me. I don't believe everyone has to chant just because I chant. I believe all religion is about touching something inside of yourself."
"We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure."
"It's a bit odd that nobody seems to be using the correct technical term to describe organized Islamic terrorists. They are not a faction of a religion or a social movement. They are a cult. A suicide cult."
"Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion."
"I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people - not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people."
"I never found much comfort in overly organized religion of any sort."
"No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
"Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism."
"My philosophy is that the most important aspect of any religion should be human kindness. And to try to ease the suffering of others. To try to bring light and love into the lives of mankind."
"Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science."
"What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!"
"Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce."
"I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force."
"Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion."
"Religion, like water, may be free, but when they pipe it to you, you've got to help pay for piping. And the Piper!"
"No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion."
"Religion often is misused for purely power-political goals, including war."
"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization."
"Religion is induced insanity."
"My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus."
"It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them."
"My religion centers in different areas than what's considered conventional religion."
"If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church."
"The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent."
"I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire."
"There are a lot of Grinches out there that would like nothing better than to take any references to religion out of the holiday season."
"The American way was for commerce, personal relationships, and religion to be voluntary. No one was forced to participate in something he didn't want."
"I believe that there is some spiritual entity that's greater than us. I do not belong to any specific organized religion. I have always believed that, and I believe it even more so now. I believe that someone was listening to me, and someone is giving me an incredibly blessed life."
"It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion."
"It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar."
"We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change."
"Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society."
"Religion's in the heart, not in the knees."
"So much about religion has to do with rigid, sacrosanct preciousness. I don't live my life that way, and I don't feel that's what Baha'u'llah teaches."
"When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual."
"My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston."
"Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again."
"For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God."
"The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me."
"Religion is never the problem it's the people who use it to gain power."
"I broke with my religion in college."
"For us to think we can enjoy, understand and practice the Christian religion with just Matthew to Revelation is foolishness."
"Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand."
"Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life."
"We live in a great country. It's time again to get religion about it."
"I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians."
"The United States is not a nation based upon race, creed, or religion - we are a nation based upon our loyalty and allegiance to our country and her principles."
"Anyone with sincere religious beliefs cannot say that all religions are true. That is so illogical it is pathetic. All religion cannot be true because some of them are so diametrically opposed to each other."
"I am not going to condemn anybody. That's where religion gets a bad name, when people get holier than thou. We are all human. If my children make a mistake, I want them to know it is all right and they should try harder next time."
"My political ideas and things like that, even my religion, I try to keep close to me because it's a personal thing, and I don't shove it down people's throats. I don't condemn any artist that wants to do that, like the Baldwins. That's their choice. But in my world, I'm just an entertainer."
"I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion."
"Religion has become so many different things. Religion is an economic thing for some people. Religion is a gun."
"For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties."
"Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism and our second great philosopher was an agnostic."
"When asked if I consider myself Buddhist, the answer is, Not really. But it's more my religion than any other because I was brought up with it in an intellectual and spiritual environment. I don't practice or preach it, however."
"The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion."
"Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem."
"I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions."
"Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept."
"After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful."
"I did an album a long time ago called 'Replicas, ' which was entirely science-fiction driven, or science-fantasy. Since then it's been a song here, a song there. It's not really a constant theme. I've written far more about my problems with religion, with God and all that."
"Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century."
"I'm just confused as to where we lost that in America because it is everyone's God-given right to think the way they think and that's fine. That's why our ancestors came here to America, to believe what they want, pray how they want and follow a religion with whoever they want."
"In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion."
"Communism was meant to be an alternative religion."
"I love it when the left and when the president say, 'Don't try to impose your values on us, you folks who hold your Bibles in your hand and cling to your guns.' They have values too. Our values are based on religion, based on life. Their values are based on a religion of self."
"Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call 'lightly religious.' So I don't buy the notion that we can't laugh about religion in America."
"I grew up with the religion of 'Star Wars, ' frankly. That's when I realized there is something bigger out there... and it's called The Force."
"But I remember the moment when my father died. I wasn't a very committed Catholic beforehand, but when that happened it suddenly all felt so obvious: I now believe religion is our attempt to find an explanation, for us to feel more protected."
"Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God."
"I think I like big issues, but I don't believe in God or religion."
"There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible."
"Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers."
"I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted."
"Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art."
"Twenty five percent of Israeli citizens are not even Jewish. Anybody can become an Israeli citizen if you qualify. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship."
"People still kill in the name of religion. We haven't evolved to the point where we're one tribe called humans."
"I think we have to believe in things we don't see. That's really important for all of us, whether it's your religion or Santa Claus, or whatever. That's pretty much what it's about."
"As long as there are religions, there are going to be people who are hiding their rottenness behind the veil of religion."
"A cult is a religion with no political power."
"I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off 'Thought for the Day' when it comes on the radio."
"We're all sick of holy wars and bloodshed because religion is supposed to give us life and a better life and is supposed to bring out our best self. When it results in mass destruction and hatred and anxiety, it's the antithesis I think of what religion was designed to do."
"I just hate one-dimensional portrayals of religion it's too cheap and easy to do, and ignores the nuances that go into having a belief system."
"Someone once told me that religion is like a knife: You can stab someone with it, or you can slice bread with it."
"Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere."
"I think people's perception of a rich girl is literal, but metaphorically I embrace it as being rich in love, spirit, joy and religion. So it's not about money."
"I could never take the idea of religion very seriously."
"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."
"Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art."
"The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, THAT my friends, is true perversion."
"Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It's a painful religion. We're all gluttons for punishment."
"You're always going to have extremists in every religion."
"There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation."
"In the 21st century, I believe the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion."
"Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions."
"I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control."
"I firmly believe that the mission of religion in the 21st century must be to contribute concretely to the peaceful coexistence of humankind."
"The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn't pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to."
"Yoga is not a religion to me."
"A lot of people have questioned how yoga and their own spiritual beliefs can come together. Yoga actually pre-dates religion."
"I know it's very idealistic and utopian, but I believe we need to just let everyone not be judged in terms of religion, groups or nations or region."
"There are fundamentalist psychopaths in every religion in the world. Every single one."
"Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?"
"There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too."
"Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings."
"Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness."
"Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?"
"Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise."
"We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society."
"There was no religion in my life growing up. Did God invent us or did we invent God?"
"I try to just talk about human stories and what I think about religion or teapots or whatever."
"Selfishness is the only real atheism unselfishness the only real religion."
"Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation."
"Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him."
"Some people are that - more than a parent, more than a role model, more than anything less than a religion."
"Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion."
"A religion without mystery must be a religion without God."
"The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms."
"One person's religion is another person's cult."
"Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man."
"Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God."
"You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I like the way that religion is done there."
"Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it."
"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion."
"I have never made fun of religion. Religion is something I don't even want to mess with, because I am really afraid of the clouds opening up and my being struck by lightning."
"I wish your increase in holiness, number, love, religion, and righteousness and wait you, and cease to contend with these men that are gone from us, for there is nothing that shall convince them but judgment."
"Religion is run by thought police. 'Obey. Listen. This is what you do. Don't ask questions. Go die for your country.' The spirituality says, 'Okay, you can die for your country, but know what you're doing while you're doing it.'"
"I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968."
"If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it."
"Haven't two hundred years of failed missionary work overseas taught anybody anything? You can't convert people to anything - whether religion, or something as inane as our flicks."
"It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use... The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air."
"I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty."
"So much of religion is exegesis. I would rather follow in the footprints of Christ than all of the dogma."
"Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost."
"The most important part of my religion is to play guitar."
"Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it, - without having regard to any religion or opinion."
"Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite."
"That which we call the Hindu religion is really the Eternal religion because it embraces all others."
"If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be."
"9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us."
"I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion."
"Religion and philosophy, philosophy and religion - they're two words which are both... different. In spelling."
"Attacks on a politician's identity - questioning Romney's religion, say, or Obama's birthplace - tend to come when an opponent is desperate and can't sell himself."
"Take away the Book of Mormon and the revelations, and where is our religion? We have none."
"I still love the theology of the Mormon religion and think it is a wonderful way to grow up."
"The importance that our society attaches to sport is incredible. After all, is football a game or a religion? The people of this country have allowed sports to get completely out of hand."
"Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable the principles of it are troublesome."
"Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves."
"I hate organized religion. I think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think you have to pick your own God and be true to him. I always say 'him' rather than 'her.' Maybe it's because of my generation, but I don't like the idea of a female God. I see God as a benevolent male."
"Beside all this I think there was something personal, being Muslim myself who lived in the west I felt that it was my obligation my duty to tell the truth about Islam. It is a religion that has a 700 million following, yet it's so little known about it which surprised me."
"The Left is doing to America what it has done to almost everything it has deeply influenced - the arts, the university, religion, culture, minorities, Europe: ruining it."
"Leftism seeks to undo most of the values that are distinct to Judeo-Christian religion."
"I have a problem with religion that makes it so, like, 'We are the ones. We are the chosen ones.'"
"A man will do more for his stubbornness than for his religion or his country."
"Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life."
"You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life."
"So, basically, my view is I don't want to support the exploitation of animals, and within reason, I will do what I can to avoid it, but it's not like it's a religion for me. It's not like I consider I'm polluted if somehow some bit of milk or cheese or something passes my lips."
"No, the religion of Jesus is a social religion."
"I think it's perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion."
"Religion needs a baptism of horse sense."
"Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?"
"What is especially important is addressing the question of how religion can be enforced through political means and what can be done to create a political environment that, on the one hand, acknowledges the role of religion in society, while on the other hand does not impose one religion on the populace at the expense of all others."
"Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equaled in American elections."
"More than this, even in those white men who professed religion we found much inconsistency of conduct. They spoke much of spiritual things, while seeking only the material."
"Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science."
"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion."
"The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood."
"I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us."
"Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves."
"I also like to look at the dynamic that takes place between religion and science because, in a way, both are asking the same questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The methodologies are diametrically opposed, but their motivation is the same the wellspring is the same in both cases."
"More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion."
"Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion."
"What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness."
"But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he's brilliant at. He can't still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness."
"If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary."
"To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy."
"Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion."
"It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion."
"No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism."
"Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly."
"I mean, I went to a Catholic boys' school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me."
"Being a rock star is like being a cult leader - you really have to be in your own religion."
"The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it is sex."
"It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late."
"I've found a more personal, pagan kind of religion to satisfy the spiritual side of things."
"Religion doesn't play any part in my life in terms of how I live my life. But I don't think I've ever gone through a day in my life without hearing someone say the word 'Jew' or saying it myself."
"Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building."
"But let's just say, I'm Irish. I grew up in the 1950s. Religion had a very tight iron fist."
"I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate."
"Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason."
"Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization."
"After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn't mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It's a dogma which one is supposed to accept without question."
"Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society."
"The trouble with many men is that they have got just enough religion to make them miserable. If there is not joy in religion, you have got a leak in your religion."
"There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God."
"All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many."
"There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion."
"I'm not defined by where I came from. I never took part in the rules and hatred that sometimes go along with religion. But if my parents are happy with what they believe, then I'm happy to stay out of their way. We agree to disagree."
"I don't normally talk about my religion publicly because I don't want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is beautiful if you learn it the right way."
"Religion is the last refuge of human savagery."
"The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly."
"Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin."
"Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities."
"Islam is a violent, I was going to say religion, but it's not a religion. It's a political system. It's a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination. That is the ultimate aim."
"Religion leaves no room for human complexity."
"I'm very interested in religion as something to study, but I'm not a religious person in the slightest."
"Religion is doing a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy."
"There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them."
"My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another."
"The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought."
"The fact that religion plays such a part in how people vote troubles me, troubles me as a minister's daughter. Because I always felt that the separation of church and state was what our forefathers and foremothers really fought for."
"I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender."
"If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas."
"If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture."
"Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt."
"In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything. I think that's kind of natural for anyone who's just embraced Islam - or any religion - as a convert. It was important for me to duck out of the fast and furious life I'd been living as a pop star. I was in a different mood."
"They have hijacked my religion."
"The latest horror to hit the U.S. looks to have been caused by people of Middle Eastern origin, bearing Muslim names. Again, shame. This fuels more hatred for a religion and a people who have nothing to do with these events."
"There was no division I could see between the essential teaching of all Prophets and wise men of religion."
"Religion is doing a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he 'lives' his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy."
"Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm."
"Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories."
"In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge."
"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."
"I am not systematic at all when it comes to religion. I just love life. And I'm not judgmental. And I'm a vegetarian."
"Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine."
"Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter."
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
"Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas."
"Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch."
"The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance."
"Real religion is no religion at all."
"There are two sorts of hypocrites: ones that are deceived with their outward morality and external religion and the others are those that are deceived with false discoveries and elevation which often cry down works, and men's own righteousness, and."
"Personally, I don't choose any particular religion or symbol or group of words or teachings to define me. That's between me and the most high. You know, my higher self. The Creator."
"There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine."
"Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide."
"Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness."
"Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease."
"Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print."
"I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again."
"Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments."
"Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know."
"After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession."
"It's one thing to be religious, but it's another thing to make religion your policy."
"Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."
"God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion."
"The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms."
"I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is."
"Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost."
"There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion."
"If I don't talk about my religion, if I say I'm not discussing it or different humanitarian things I'm working on, they're like, 'He's avoiding it.' If I do talk about it, it becomes, 'Oh, he's proselytizing.'"
"It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing."
"When push comes to shove, it ain't the science that's going to lift you up-it's the belief, the spiritual side of life, that's going to lift you up, no matter what religion you are."
"I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution."
"Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff."
"I don't have a religion. I believe in a God. I don't know what it looks like but it's MY god. My own interpretation of the supernatural."
"You know, religion itself, Eastern and Western, is divisive and quarrelsome anyway."
"I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance."
"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous those in philosophy only ridiculous."
"After all, is football a game or a religion?"
"There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed."
"Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of."
"Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands."
"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."
"My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism."
"Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies."
"A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification."
"Moral values, and a culture and a religion, maintaining these values are far better than laws and regulations."
"The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one."
"Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion."
"If your religion doesn't teach you the difference between good and evil, your religion is worse than useless."
"There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion."
"There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion."
"Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth."
"For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency."
"He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity."
"Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs."
"All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches one to be lenient towards others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion."
"If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion."
"All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake."
"The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity."
"I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves."
"Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive."
"True character arises from a deeper well than religion."
"The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him."
"Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity."
"Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion."
"Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life."
"Hey, I'm a Catholic deer hunter, I am happy to be clinging to my guns and my religion."
"So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds."
"I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth."
"The difference between a saint and a hypocrite is that one lies for his religion, the other by it."
"I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it that's my religion."
"But even in the Christian religion, much of its real meaning is hidden by words that are misleading and symbols that but few understand."
"I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way."
"Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it."
"The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever."
"The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other."
"The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes."
"It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have."
"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic."
"People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced."
"Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!"
"There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion."
"Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice."
"I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder."
"You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion."
"Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals."
"I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock."
"Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be a religion, as it kills responsibility which is an essence of the true religious act."
"Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion."
"Let me say this loud and clear. There is a world of difference between terrorist acts and the Islamic Shari'a. Islam is not only a religion, but a way of life. And at its heart lie the sacred principles of tolerance and dialogue."
"If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!"
"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."
"Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference."
"Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed."
"It is easy to talk on religion, but difficult to practice it."
"Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion."
"The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."
"We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies."
"We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."
"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that."
"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst."
"In nearly every religion I am aware of, there is a variation of the golden rule. And even for the non-religious, it is a tenet of people who believe in humanistic principles."
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."
"I'm religiously opposed to religion."
"Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities."
"As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."
"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."
"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all."
"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
"If any of you should ask me for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say that it is in one word - prayer. Live and die without prayer, and you will pray long enough when you get to hell."
"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."
"Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples."
"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."
"Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion."
"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
"No religion has mandated killing others as a requirement for its sustenance or promotion."
"Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies."
"There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt."
"Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there."
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
"It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust."
"The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross."
"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense."
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
"Selfishness is the only real atheism aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion."
"War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it."
"I don't necessarily believe in organized religion."
"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect."
"Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds."
"Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth."
"Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true."
"Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery."
"Religion is the opium of the masses."
"The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude."
"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
"Religion is just mind control."
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences."
"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."
"There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion."
"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand."
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
"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."
"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
"All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world."
"Religion is a matter of the heart. No physical inconvenience can warrant abandonment of one's own religion."
"One's own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one's Maker and no one else's."
"Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion."
"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble."
"Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor - over each other."
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
"It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read."
"Conversion is not my intention. Changing religion is not easy. You may develop some kind of confusion or difficulties."
"A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion."
"Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences."
"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it."
"We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection."
"Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion."
"One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion."
"True religion is real living living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."
"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever - this is a somewhat new kind of religion."
"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."
"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
"Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents, only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others, cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world."
"The Sabbath is a weekly cathedral raised up in my dining room, in my family, in my heart."
"I was raised Catholic, but my father's people were Methodist, so we went to both churches."
"The Godhead consists of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is a material being."
"Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual."
"Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."
"To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts to the second, the Epistles to the third, the Revelation."
"Our Father and Our God, unto thee, O Lord we lift our souls."
"Give yourself entirely to God, enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul."
"There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience."
"The Son of God became man so that we might become God."
"This is God's world, not Satan's. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians."
"Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God."
"We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and open-air of common life."
"My life was changed in one breath from God."
"Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to Truth."
"Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure."
"Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God."
"More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer care about religion."
"Teach us to give and not to count the cost."
"Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions."
"The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind."
"If, then, you are looking for the way by which you should go, take Christ, because He Himself is the way."
"Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters."
"One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons."
"I know the Bible is inspired because it inspires me."
"Wonder is the basis of worship."
"The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go."
"Human beings must be known to be loved but Divine beings must be loved to be known."
"Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes."
"So I say to you, Ask and it will be given to you search, and you will find knock, and the door will be opened for you."
"We are punished by our sins, not for them."
"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."
"If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul."
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
"Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words."
"Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do - they all contain truths."
"When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
"There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples my philosophy is kindness."
"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple the philosophy is kindness."
