Religion Quotes

...Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck. If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place. Wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them. You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them.

~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

~ John Patrick Shanley

...atheism is not a conscious act of turning away from all gods. It is simply the final destination for those who think. ...you will be pleased to discover that the sky does not fall down on your head. ... if you still want to pray, you can (the success rate of your prayers is unlikely to change).

~ Guy P. Harrison

I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

~ John Henry Newman

The only thing that is still free in this world is religion, which is why a lot of people find it.

~ Jimmy Buffett

Please do not ever think I am without you or you are without me, I live with you all the time.

~ Santosh Kalwar

It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.

~ Christopher Hitchens

The healing is my working out my salvation. The need constant because my desire for seperateness constantly wrestles with my need for oneness with Jesus. The search for Jesus is bigger, deeper and agonizing.

~ W. Scott Lineberry

Well, what I don't understand is why people get all dressed up and drive to church so they can sit there and get scolded. Seems to me it'd be a whole lot easier for the to just stay home in their pj's, eat pancakes, and get yelled at over the radion.

~ Beth Hoffman

If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official Unselfishness of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.

~ C.s. Lewis

Religion turned some folks belligerent.

~ Eileen Wilks

Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

~ Dorothy Allison

I’m an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation.

~ Daniel Radcliffe

The Devil answer'd: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

~ William Blake

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase Spare the rod and spoil the child. No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid.

~ Chris Crutcher

If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!

~ Clark Adams

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

~ Oscar Wilde

I felt an overwhelming gratitude in my life right now and wanted a chance to acknowledge it. I felt that any thanks given to any god all went to the same place, anyway, no matter what religion you were centered in.

~ Cate Tiernan

The life of West, Nietzsche said, is based on Christianity. The values of the West are based on Christianity. Some of these values seem to have taken a life of their own, and this gives us the illusion that we can get rid of Christianity and keep the values. This, Nietzsche says, is an illusion...Remove the Christian foundation, and the values must go too.

~ Dinesh D'souza

I had retained little of what is generally called religion, except for a visceral conviction that our lives are controlled by some universal mechanism that is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that was what others called God. Perhaps not.

~ Michael Cox

Don't they get afraid, then?They have a religion for that.

~ Ray Bradbury

As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning it origin in human nature.

~ David Hume

There is only one language, the language of the Heart. There is only one religion, the religion of Love.

~ Sri Sathya Sai Baba

I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All religions have something to say about sex, and it rarely coincides with scientific knowledge of sex and sexuality.

~ Darrel Ray

I figured anybody who talked about church as much as she did was using it a little like cocaine anyhow.

~ Keith Ablow

If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Some religions actually go so far as to label anyone who belongs to a religious sect other than their own a heretic, even though the overall doctrines and impressions of godliness are nearly the same. For example: The Catholics believe the Protestants are doomed to Hell simply because they do not belong to the Catholic Church. In the same way, many splinter groups of the Christian faith, such as the evangelical or revivalist churches, believe the Catholics worship graven images. (Christ is depicted in the image that is most physiologically akin to the individual worshipping him, and yet the Christians criticize heathens for the worship of graven images.) And the Jews have always been given the Devil's name.

~ Anton Szandor Lavey

But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

~ Frank Herbert

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

~ Carl Sagan

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

~ Albert Einstein

I dreamt of worldly success once.

~ Miyamoto Musashi

My dear sister, you can’t escape God, and you can’t escape your skeletons in the closet. They will always be there until you take them out from behind those dusty old moth-eaten coats. Your exterior facade of ‘everything is alright’ only works for a little while, and then the cracks begin to show. You can only hide behind yourself for so long. You can’t keep running!

~ Corallie Buchanan

Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his right mind. p. 31

~ Thomas Merton

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

~ Sigmund Freud

It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing' people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.

~ Terry Pratchett

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

~ Sam Harris

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

~ Mary Mccarthy

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

But you must still know to respect other people's faith.''Why? We don't respect any other delusion. We lock up people who believe they're Christ, yet we're supposed to humour those who believe in him.''By definition, faith is irrational: a belief you hold against the normal rules of evidence.''In which case I believe in Jedi

~ Michael Arditti