Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand sensual things.
To have religion upon authority, and not upon conviction, is like a finger-watch, to be set forwards or backwards, as he pleases that has it in keeping.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
Religion does not censure or exclude Unnumbered pleasures, harmlessly pursued.
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Religion is no more national than conscience.
It can not be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!
While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.
Ah, reader, put thy trust in thy creator, and thou wilt be safe; but if thou trustest to the book called the scriptures thou trustest to the rotten staff of fable and falsehood.
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
...It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
The constitutional freedom of religion is the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights
I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.
Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous. . . .
The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend to all the happiness of man.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.
Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.
Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.
Religion is the mortar that binds society together; the granite pedestal of liberty; the strong backbone of the social system.
An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
The endeavor to change universal power by selfish supplication I do not believe in.
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circustance.
I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.
I can not imagine a God ... made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great'.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.
For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.
Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Religion implies revelation.
Religion is not a dogma, nor an emotion, but a service.
Without religion the highest endowments of intellect can only render the possessor more dangerous if he be ill disposed; if well disposed, only more unhappy.
What if the meek inherited the Earth and we had to defend ourselves from Martians?
We must move as quickly as possible to a one-world government; a one-world religion; under a one world leader.
Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity.
With soap, baptism is a good thing.
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
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