Religious Quotations

Quotations of a divine inspiration? Or possibly simply concerning some aspect of religion.

Showing 109 through 144 of 162 quotations in this category.

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."

-Isaac Asimov

"All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers."

-Mikhail A. Bakunin

"Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful."

-Martin Amis

"Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water"

-Hebrews 10:22, Bible

"Religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."

-Stendhal

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"As soon as I start to ask about going somewhere, my dad'll be like, 'What would Jesus do, Emily?' And, 'I don't think Jesus would do that.' It gets on my nerves. I'm like, 'I don't know what Jesus would do. I think Jesus might go.'"

-Emily, teenager

"The Bible as we have it contains elements that are scientifically incorrect or even morally repugnant. No amount of 'explaining away' can convince us that such passages are the product of Divine Wisdom."

-Bernard J. Bamberger

"I have not placed reading before praying because I regard it more important, but because, in order to pray aright, we must understand what we are praying for."

-Angelina Grimke

"As optimism has died, human beings increasingly turned either to fundamentalist religion or to secular materialism in the constant search for meaning."

-Bishop John Shelby Spong

"Some Christians believe the Bible has defined God. Other Christians believe the sacred teaching of their church has defined God. Both have inevitably been forced to distort the reality and the mystery of God to come to those conclusions."

-Bishop John Shelby Spong

"Obviously, marriage is in trouble, and yet the greatest threat to marriage comes not from homosexuals. It comes from heterosexuals who find it difficult to remain married to one another."

-Rev. Jim Baker of Westminster Presbyterian

"There is no dichotomy between man and God's image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being, abuses God's image."

-Oscar Romero

"But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness."

-James 3:17-18

"The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers."

-Denis Diderot

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

-Gene Roddenberry

"I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

-Mohandas Gandhi

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."

-Arthur C. Clarke

"Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock."

-Anaxagorus, ca. 475 BC

"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

-Ambrose Bierce

"The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr."

-Prophet Mohammad

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

-Napoleon

"You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God."

-Ernest Dimnet

"Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen."

-Michel de Montaigne

"To accept Naturalism is to reject such entities as Cartesian minds, private visual and tactual spaces, angelic beings and God."

-D. M. Armstrong

"MacArthur is the type of man who thinks that when he gets to heaven, God will step down from the great white throne and bow him into His vacated seat."

-Douglas MacArthur

"God definitely exists in what you create, or in the magic that you discover within yourself. And I think Christ was a magician in that sense, and someone that I found I could really relate to, in his being a revolutionary and sacrificing himself for it."

-Marilyn Manson

"Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism."

-Isaac Asimov

"A faith adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward."

-William James, on Pascal's Wager

"The pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive."

-Albert Einstein

"Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds."

-Hebrews 10:24, Bible

"Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme."

-Bernard Katz

"A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a .45."

-unknown

"There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair."

-Albert Einstein

"God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach."

-Heywood Broun

"The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the...passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life."

-Bertrand Russell