Religion Quotes

The tendancy of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
– George Eliot
I'm a practicing Christian - and I'm going to keep practicing till I get it right - but I don't feel everyone has to practice the same religion that I do. You have a right to worship who you choose and how you choose to.
– Jane Elliot
No white group has founded a major religion on this planet. The major religious were started in the Orient and the Middle East, not in Greece and Rome. I always knew you racists didn't have a prayer.
– Jane Elliot
Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.
– Maria Edgeworth
This is a war against terrorists. Not a war against a religion, but a war against terrorists.
– Gordon England
In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.
– Thomas Erskine
The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
My generation was bold enough to question many things and to seek spirituality over religion. We haven't succeeded in overthrowing the old order yet, and maybe there are some meanings to be found in my story about coming of age spiritually in the latter half of the twentieth century.
– Matthew Fox
Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer.
– Dick Francis
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.
– Benjamin Franklin
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
– Sigmund Freud
Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
– Northrop Frye
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
– Northrop Frye
Religion is more like response to a friend than it is like obedience to an expert.
– Austin Farrer
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
– James Feibleman
Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
– John Kenneth Galbraith
Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.
– John Galsworthy
As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance,cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.
– Mahatma Gandhi
My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.
– Mahatma Gandhi
No religion which is narrow and which cannot satisfy the test of reason, will survive the coming reconstruction of society in which the values will have changed and character, not possession of wealth, title or birth will be the test of merit.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Surely conversion is a matter between man and his Maker who alone knows his creatures' hearts. A conversion without a clean heart is, in my opinion, a denial of God and Religion. Conversion without cleanliness of heart can only be a matter of sorrow, not joy, to a godly person.
– Mahatma Gandhi
True religion is not a narrow dogma. It is not external observance. It is faith in God and living in the presence of God. It means faith in a future life, in truth and Ahimsa. There prevails today a sort of apathy towards these things of the Spirit.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
– Bill Gates
European Catholics tend to be somewhat grim and dour and straightlaced. We shouldn't have been, but we are. We can learn from the Latinos that Catholicism is a religion of festivity and celebration.
– Andrew Greeley
I'd say that Catholicism in the United States has the distinct advantage of being in a pluralistic society, where your religion contributes something to your identity. So you tend to define yourself as a Catholic. I'm Irish, Catholic, a Democrat from the West Side of Chicago, and that's pretty much my identity.
– Andrew Greeley
One Hispanic woman... was telling me about her religion, and all she was talking about were the parties, the festivals.
– Andrew Greeley
Believing that in a wise way it is good to go to church, and that associating with Christians would improve my character, I have adopted the Christian religion... I am not ashamed to be a Christian... I have advised all of my people who are not Christians, to study that religion, because it seems to me the best religion in enabling one to live right.
– Geronimo
Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.
– Eric Gill
After all, political correctness is/was in many ways an attempt by the puritan left to reinvent Victorian morality without any reference to God or religion or tradition, rooting it instead in victimology and neo-Romanticism.
– Jonah Goldberg
The Pied Piper enjoyed people enjoying themselves. He was colorblind and race-blind and religion-blind.
– Hank Greenberg
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.
– John B. S. Haldane
Such a wife as I want... must be young, handsome I lay most stress upon a good shape, sensible a little learning will do, well-bread, chaste, and tender. As to religion, a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in God and hate a saint.
– Alexander Hamilton
I am a rabbi. I am an Orthodox rabbi. I was ordained an Orthodox rabbi, at the age of 18. I am writing a book on the Talmud, right now. This isn't being said, out of some liberal prattle: It's being said from the very essence and the heart of our religion.
– Arthur Hertzberg
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.
– David Hilbert
The things that unite the Australian and American people are shared values: the belief that the individual is more important than the state, that strong families are a nation's greatest asset, that competitive free enterprise is the ultimate foundation of national wealth, and that the worth of a person is determined by that person's character and hard work, not by their religion or race or colour or creed or social background.
– John Howard
Sacraments, like the Incarnation itself, constitute physical points at which the eternal touches time, or the unseen touches the seen, or grace touches nature. It is the Gnostics and Manicheans who want a purely disembodied religion.
– Thomas Howard
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
– Victor Hugo
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
– Aldous Huxley
Philosophy is concerned with the undermining and questioning of dogmas, whereas religion is all about accepting and supporting them.
– Jim Hankinson
Religion; humanity's greatest folly, greatest curse.
– Kevin Harris
Religion and education are no match for evil without the grace of God.
– B. R. Hayden
Religion is the highest vanity.
– Friedrich Hebbel
Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.
– Francis Herbert Hedge
To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.
– Ruth Hubbard
I wouldn't call it religion. I call it a conscious contact with my Higher Power. I choose to call him God. I used to call him Glenn, but that used to piss him off!
– Glenn Hughes
The world is my country, science is my religion.
– Christiaan Huygens
A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution. But though death is not desired, the result of it may be, for dying to the Christian is the way to life eternal.
– William Jay
Let the professors of Christianity recommend their religion by deeds of benevolence - by Christian meekness - by lives of temperance and holiness.
– Richard Mentor Johnson
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.
– Timothy Jones
When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!
– David Starr Jordan
If I had to live my life over again, I would have a different father, a different wife and a different religion.
– John F. Kennedy
Christianity, in its enlarged sense, as a religion revealed and taught in the bible, is not unknown to our law.
– James Kent
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.
– James Kent
Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things - the teacher of all truth.
– Charles Kingsley
For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.
– Bernard Katz
Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme.
– Bernard Katz
The future is religion and commerce, aphrodisiac and Benzedrine, a mother of mysterious comfort and a mistress of familiar ravishments ever on the verge of embracing or destroying us.
– Eugene Kennedy
Ultimately, being a part of a team means competing, working, living and winning and losing together. And in the end, a teammate's nationality, his language, his taste in music or his religion aren't sources of division, but in fact mediums of greater friendship, understanding and success.
– Steve Kerr
People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.
– Irving Kristol
Satanism could become the major religion of the 21st century.
– Anton LaVey
The Bible is not my book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
– Abraham Lincoln
I consider myself 40 percent Catholic and 60 percent Baptist. but I'm in favor of every religion, with the possible exception of snake-chunking. Anybody that so presumes on how he stands with Providence that he will let a snake bite him, I say he deserves what he's got coming to him.
– Earl Long
War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.
– Martin Luther
We fully support the strikes against terrorist targets, not against the country, not against the culture, not against a religion, but against an enemy of them all.
– Ricardo Lagos
What we have today is a different kind of enemy - it's not a country, it's not a particular society, it's not a religion. It has an unknown face.
– Ricardo Lagos
Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.
– Leon Lederman
The moment religion organizes into a specific creed it becomes a political force. From Moses down to Brigham Young, every creed-founder has been a State-builder.
– Daniel De Leon
Christianity stands for freedom, we don't want to impose our religion on everyone else. We just don't want secular humanist values or homosexual values to be forced upon us under the guise of anti-harassment laws, speech codes, hate crime laws, or sensitivity training.
– David Limbaugh
That's the type of thing I'm trying to speak out against the most, religion controlling what we see and what we do in our personal lives, even if you're not a part of that religion. Antichrist Superstar [the album] is a challenge really, to traditional morality and it's... to make people question that and make people think about different perspectives.
– Marilyn Manson
No matter what your religion, you should try to become a government program, for then you will have everlasting life.
– Lynn Martin
But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?
– Harriet Martineau
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.
– Harriet Martineau
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
– H. L. Mencken
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
– Henry Miller
In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.
– Jonathon Miller
Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked; therefore whoever would argue or laugh it out of the world without giving some equivalent for it ought to be treated as a common enemy.
– Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
The only thing of weight that can be said against modern honor is that it is directly opposite to religion. The one bids you bear injuries with patience, the other tells you if you don't resent them, you are not fit to live.
– Bernard Mandeville
The role of the federal government should be neutral toward culture just as it is toward religion.
– Preston Manning
Religion has a good place and it has its good people.
– Garry Marshall
These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.
– Anthony de Mello
Please accept a promise from me in his name that I will always live in the religion in which he died.
– Giacomo Meyerbeer
Religion reveals itself in struggling to reveal the meaning of the world.
– S. H. Miller
Religion which is interested only in itself, in its prestige and success, in its institutions and ecclesiastical niceties, is worse than vanity; it is essentially incestuous.
– S. H. Miller
The task of organized religion is not to prove that God was in the 1st century, but that he is in the 20th.
– S. H. Miller
The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.
– Octave Mirbeau
The religion of Christ is not aspirin to deaden the pain of living, it is not a discussion group, nor a miraculous medal nor a piety, nor bingo for God. Not anything less than a joyous adventure of being Christ in a world still skeptical of him.
– John Monaghan
Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
– William Least Heat Moon
In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
– Richard Milhous Nixon
Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.
– Emil Nolde
Whenever religion, no matter where it comes from, when it claims to spread the word of God through [the] State it becomes dangerous.
– Azar Nafisi
I don't believe in God. The religion mongers segregate women from the human race, I too am divided, I too am defrauded of my human rights.
– Taslima Nasrin
Women are oppressed in the east, in the west, in the south, in the north. Women are oppressed inside, outside home, a woman is oppressed in religion, she is oppressed outside religion.
– Taslima Nasrin
Terrorism cannot be linked with any religion or nation, as such approach will inevitably lead to further escalation of tenseness in the world.
– Nursultan Nazarbayev
Religion mixed with politics in a multi-faith country like ours portends destruction and devastation.
– Olusegun Obasanjo
Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
– Robert Owen
Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
– Pope John Paul II
Secondly, the death of the righteous is to be desired rather then lamented: and it were a dishonour put upon Religion to think a pious man less happy dead, then when he liv'd.
– John Pearson