Quotes on Religious Intolerance

If I would follow your advice and Jesus could perceive it, he, as a Jewish teacher, surely would not approve of such behavior.

As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.

It is intolerable that the world's religions - founded on the values of love and compassion - should provide a pretext for the expression of hatred and violence.

The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, THAT my friends, is true perversion.

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

A man who is convinced of the truth of his religion is indeed never tolerant. At the least, he is to feel pity for the adherent of another religion but usually it does not stop there. The faithful adherent of a religion will try first of all to convince those that believe in another religion and usually he goes on to hatred if he is not successful. However, hatred then leads to persecution when the might of the majority is behind it.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

The fact that man produces a concept "I" besides the totality of his mental and emotional experiences or perceptions does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything. Most of so-called philosophy is due to this kind of fallacy.

Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions.

Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.

Without God, there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience... without God, there is a coarsening of the society; without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.