Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.
The world looks like it was designed. Of course, the Sun also looks like it goes around the Earth. It is only thru science that we know that both of these perceptions are wrong.
A former congressman on his sexting habit: I have made terrible mistakes. I have not been honest with myself, my family, my constituents, my friends and supporters and the media.
I think quite a bit of organized religion has become big business. Jesus Christ never sold the word of God. He never gave a sermon and then said, 'For $8.99, you can buy the CD.'
When it came to religion, I felt I belonged to no one. It saddened me, it angered me, it confused me, and it made me religiously ambivalent. So I chose my calling: Cubs baseball.
Doubt . . . impels a search for the truth. It opens the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. Indeed, . . . faith anesthetizes the desire to seek knowledge and truth.
If everyone will try to understand the core of his own religion and adhere to it, and will not allow false teachers to dictate to him, there will be no room left for quarrelling.
Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.
Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.
If you worry, you are a worrier because your mind is saturated with worry thoughts. To counteract these, mark every passage in your Bible that speaks of faith, hope, and courage.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.
Enter into the promises of God. It is your inheritance. You will do more in one year if you are really filled with the Holy Ghost than you could do in fifty years apart from Him.
In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country.
The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.
Some people think that religion is not essential to society. I do not hold this view. I consider the foundation of religion to be essential to the life and practices of a society.
True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.
If God would concede me His omnipotence for 24 hours, you would see how many changes I would make in the world. But if He gave me His wisdom too, I would leave things as they are.
I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.
Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.
There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.
Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.
[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.
God is waiting to be gracious, and is willing to make us happy in religion, if we would not run away from him. We refuse to open the window shutters, and complain that it is dark.
I don't believe in heaven and hell. I don't know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life - the only thing I know to exist - to be wasted.
The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.
I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.
There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven't got to respect their opinion.
Salvation is not a religion. It's not rules or regulations or rituals. Salvation is a relationship. That relationship doesn't begin when you get to Heaven; it begins here on Earth.
I just think religion is something... It could be a beautiful thing for the individual, but when it becomes organized, that's when religion starts taking a kind of ugly turn to me.
You live on Earth only for a few short years which you call an incarnation, and then you leave your body as an outworn dress and go for refreshment to your true home in the spirit.
Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine.
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.
We all are Indians, and that should be our only religion. What is the need to be called a Hindu, Muslim, or Christian? Does anybody have any religion or caste at the time of birth?
Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.
An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost, the other a corpse.
If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or to the ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin - but it is not of Edward of England that I shall ask pardon.
If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
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.
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.
I have grown to understand that no matter where we come from, human beings, at heart, are the same. Defining ourselves based on race, religion, and ethnicity is like betraying that.
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.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society.
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.
I want clean water and clean air and conservation... that's not what extreme environmentalists are all about. For them, it is a religion. They believe in trees and animals, not God.
But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.