Quotes on Religion

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

I really feel that some people neglect and overlook compassion because they associate it with religion. Of course, everyone is free to choose whether they pay religion any regard, but to neglect compassion is a mistake because it is the source of our own well-being.

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.

Just because you believe in something does not mean that it is true.

If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people.

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ...Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

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.

Something is wrong. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, crime, torture, corruption and the ice capades. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. This is not what you expect to find on the resume of a supreme being. It's what you expect from an office temp with a bad attitude.

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.

One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics.

For those who may not find happiness to exercise religious faith, it's okay to remain a radical atheist; it's absolutely an individual right, but the important thing is with a compassionate heart - then no problem.

I can not imagine a God ... made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great'.

The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Superstition is an enemy to civil liberty.

[priests are] the pretenders to power and dominion, and to a superior sanctity of character, distinct from virtue and good morals.

Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.

Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.