Religion Quotes

I conceive the essential task of religion to be to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.

Robert Millikan

The heart of religion lies in its personal pronouns.

Martin Luthe

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

George Santayana

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

Oscar Wilde

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.

Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters".

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non - Westerners never do.

Samuel P. Huntington

Religion is what keeps the poor man from murdering the rich.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Imagine there? s no countries, it isn? t hard to do; nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.

John Lennon, Imagine

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1972)

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Albert Einstein

There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

Woodrow Wilson

Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams. They have different names but all contain water. Religions have different names, but all contain truth.

Muhammad Ali

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

Stendhal

Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

A. J. Toynbee

Present your religion to a little child, set him in the midst of those who profess it. If it frightens him, and freezes the smiles on his lips, then whatever sort of religion it is, it is not Christianity.

Unknown

Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.

Jean Guehenno

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.

Voltaire

In England there are sixty different religions and only one sauce.

Francesco Caracciolo, on alcohol

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?

Carl Sagan

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

Margaret Mead

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

John Adams

England has forty - Two religions and only two sauces.

Voltaire

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but now, as yet, intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Man without religion is the creature of circumstances.

Augustus Hare

We have enough religion to hate each other, but not enough to love each other.

Jonathan Swift

Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain.

Mark Twain

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

Kahlil Gibran

Keep thy religion to thyself.

George Carlin

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non - Existence of Zeus or Thor - But they have few followers now.

Arthur C. Clarke

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.

Voltaire

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

Richard Adams

Science and religion no more contradict each other than light and electricity.

William Hiram Foulkes

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men... the master of superstition is the people and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reverse order.

Francis Bacon

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabline it to make its peace with its destiny.

George Santayana