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Religion Quotes

Religion is a page where believers and unbelievers share space. Shakespeare and Milton lead, but Robert Ingersoll and the biologist Jerry Coyne are close behind, and the sourced favourites lean sceptical: Bertrand Russell in Sceptical Essays (1928) on moralists and Hell, Bierce in 1911 calling religion a daughter of Hope and Fear.

Three entries are flagged. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep” is credited to the missionary Jim Elliot, and the notes call it a paraphrase of the English clergyman Philip Henry (1631–1696). Newton’s remark that he could calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of the people is disputed, and it is usually tied to the South Sea stock bubble. A line about Earth and Heaven credited to David Hare is flagged misattributed.

Random quote on Religion

Most quoted on religion:

We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all.

Clarence Darrow

Struggle against it as thou wilt, yet Heaven's ways are Heaven's ways.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?

William Shakespeare

Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)

Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

Jorge Luis Borges

The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out: by this means they secured these infants went to Heaven.

Bertrand Russell

Alas! alas! how plague-spot like will sin
Spread over the wrung heart it enters in!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

We do not want a religion that deceives us for our own good.

Arthur Eddington Science and the Unseen World (1929)

When we come to a comparison of heaven and earth, then we may indeed not only forget all about the present life, but even despise and scorn it.

John Calvin

Who God doth late and early pray,
More of his grace than gifts to send,
And entertains the harmless day
With a well-chosen book or friend.

Henry Wotton

There's nae sorrow there, John,
There's neither cauld nor care, John,
The day is aye fair,
In the land o' the leal.

Carolina Nairne

The main task of any theory of evolution is to explain adaptive complexity, that is, to explain the same set of facts that Paley used as evidence of a creator.

John Maynard Smith

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.

Jimmy Swaggart

Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven; because if you do not give yourself in sympathy to goodness, goodness cannot give itself in influence to you.

Phillips Brooks

Heaven open'd wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving.

John Milton

Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever?

Aron Ra

Well, God's above all; and there be souls must be saved, and there be souls must not be saved.

William Shakespeare Othello (1603)

A Persian's Heaven is eas'ly made,
'Tis but black eyes and lemonade.

Thomas Moore

The gates that now
Stood open wide, belching outrageous flame
Far into Chaos, since the fiend pass'd through.

John Milton

Now the devil that told me I did well
Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.

William Shakespeare

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