Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.
Interpretation
Bigotry and indifference both undermine the core values of religion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes that religion can be harmed not only through outright intolerance and prejudice but also through apathy and lack of engagement. Both bigotry, which breeds divisiveness and conflict, and indifference, which leads to neglect and disconnection, serve to weaken the spiritual and communal bonds that religion can foster among people.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of understanding and accepting different faiths.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
We are bound by nothing except belief.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Resolved ... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism - free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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