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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.

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Most quoted on religion:

Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor.

Haj Amin al-Husseini

Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense.

Victor J. Stenger

I will never believe in Christ or Allah or any other God. I will never follow any religion.

Nnedi Okorafor Noor (2021)

Religion is what you sing on Sunday, Miss Stovall. Your true faith is what you want all week.

Parke Godwin Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988)

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

Bertrand Russell Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Policemen and prisons ought never to be the means used to bring men back to the practice of religion.

Napoleon Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

Carl Sagan The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.

Anaïs Nin The Novel of the Future (1969)

Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.

William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

"Religious man" is an abnormality and "religion" is the certain cause of epidemic diseases of the mind which require the care of alienists.

Benito Mussolini God Does Not Exist (1904)

Philosophy of religion … really amounts to … philosophizing on certain favorite assumptions that are not confirmed at all.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Truth suffers no loss if a vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way that virtue and religion suffer no detriment if a criminal denies them.

Friedrich Schiller

I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion.

Claude Debussy Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933)

Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present … without long discipleship and secure sustenance.

Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1956)

Religion
Hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

Christopher Marlowe The Jew of Malta (1589)

I'm suddenly worried people will think that I believe their religion can be summed up on four sex-obsessed sentences.

Ryan North

Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.

Rollo May Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

“These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?”
“Believe me, it would be easy.”

Iain Banks Use of Weapons (1990)

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

Thomas Jefferson

It's the responsibility of men of religion to … present religion as a way of tolerance, not as a cover for bloodshed.

Salam Fayyad

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