God Quotes
The writers with the most entries are not theologians: a Sufi saint, Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, then Shakespeare, Homer, Pope and Ovid. The sourced lines are mostly sceptical ones. Bertrand Russell, in Religion and Science (1935), says that with omnipotence and millions of years he would not think Man much to boast of, and Shaw, in 1903, warns against the man whose god is in the skies.
Three famous sayings are marked disputed. Voltaire’s clockwork-and-clockmaker line has no firm source. Newton’s remark that the thumb would convince him of God is reported from a palmistry article in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round (1864). “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God,” credited to Yuri Gagarin, is traced in the notes only to a 2006 book.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.
Men change their gods, and when they have changed them often enough they cease to fear their power.
Give according to your means, or God will make your means according to your giving.
God can only set in motion:
He cannot control the things he has made.
Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.