 Quotations on this page deal with the topics of God and Religion, some questioning faith and others celebrating it. You can find more religious quotations at WellofWisdom.com. Christian quotations can be found at Christian-Wisdom.com.
***** "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -H. L. Mencken ***** "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 ***** "It bemuses me that the more outspokenly 'Christian' somebody is, the more that person emphasizes the pre-Christian books of the Bible rather than the books that quote Jesus." -MECowan (on the web) ***** "I just converted out of Christianity because I saw how ironic it was that god created us as flawed creatures and expects us to thank him for saving us from our flaws." -CrimeAgainst (on the web) ***** "The heart of man is evil and desperately wicked." -Pat Robertson ***** "Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful." -Seneca ***** "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 ***** "But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." -Mikhail A. Bakunin ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov ***** "A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." -Aristotle, "Politics" ***** "I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring." -William Archer ***** "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." -Susan B. Anthony ***** "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 Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "If god doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you." -??? ***** "Fundamentalism means never having to say 'I'm wrong.'" -??? ***** "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." -George Bush, Sr. ***** "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -Stephen Roberts ***** "I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. ... In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds." -Albert Einstein ***** "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls." -Albert Einstein ***** "To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot." -Albert Einstein ***** "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment." -Albert Einstein ***** "It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus, for what is written in the Bible about him is poetically embellished." -Albert Einstein ***** "Why do you write to me "God should punish the English"? I have no close connection to either one or the other. I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him." -Albert Einstein ***** "The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action." -Albert Einstein ***** "I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies." -Albert Einstein ***** "In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests." -Albert Einstein ***** "There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair." -Albert Einstein ***** "True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness." -Albert Einstein ***** "My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality." -Albert Einstein Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly." -Albert Einstein ***** "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 ***** "I came-- though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents -- to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve." -Albert Einstein ***** "There is no room in this for the divinization of a nation, of a class, let alone of an individual. Are we not all children of one father, as it is said in religious language?" -Albert Einstein ***** "You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -Reverend Robert Cromey ***** "An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question." -John McCarthy ***** "There is a commandment against bearing false witness against my neighbor. Is there no commandment against bearing false witness against God? If I were a god, I would reserve my greatest wrath, not for those who ignored me, nor for those who contradicted me, but for those who falsely quoted me." -Martin B. Brilliant ***** "Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." -George Orwell ***** "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind." -William Clifford ***** "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 ***** "A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows." -Mark Twain ***** "Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme." -Bernard Katz ***** "A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a .45." -??? ***** "To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river." -Buddha ***** "Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last." -Charlotte Bronte Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand . . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." -Bertrand Russell ***** "Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horribly unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches. . . . The isolation of Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books, and finally the burning of the people - Hitler learned it all from the church. However, the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas." -Dagobert Runes ***** "All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies." -Baron D'Holbach ***** "Religion has come to mean placing our trust outside ourselves, remaining like children following a long succession of father figures, teachers, preachers, and politicians. And how do we know, once we have ceased to trust ourselves, whether they are Gods or psychopaths?" -xX_Fairuza_Xx ***** "Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity." -Albert Einstein ***** "My captor walked up to me and with his sandal drew a cross in the dirt. Both prisoner and guard stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away. This is my faith. The faith that unites and never divides, the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. That is my religious faith, and it is the faith I want my party to serve and the faith I hold in my country." -Senator John McCain ***** "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." -Nietzsche ***** "What if we chose the wrong religion? We're just making God madder and madder every Sunday." -Homer Simpson ***** "He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us." -Samuel Butler ***** "Through me the way into the suffering city, Through me the way to the eternal pain, Through me the way that runs among the lost. Justice urged on my high artificer; My maker was divine authority, The highest wisdom, and the primal love. Before me nothing but eternal things were made, And I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye who enter here." -The Gates of Hell (From Dante's Inferno) ***** "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 ***** "The Vision of Christ that thou dost see, Is my vision's greatest enemy. Thine is the Friend of all Mankind, Mine speaks in Parables to the blind. Thine loves the same world that mine hates, Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates." -William Blake ***** "So, let's impeach god! I would like to announce my candidacy for the position of god; among other things, I promise to offer true and unquestionable proof of my existence, as the previous holder of the office of 'god' obviously failed to do." -Rashind ***** "The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science --or any honest intellectual inquiry." -Stephen J. Gould ***** "Religion...is the opium of the masses." -Karl Marx Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money." -Leon Lederman ***** "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him." -John Morley ***** "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him." -Arthur C. Clarke ***** "If God created flawed beings, how then can He go on to blame them for their flaws?" -James Halloran ***** "Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven." -Mark Twain ***** "When no one had answers they created God. Now we have most of them, and ne day we will have all of them, rendering God useless." -??? ***** "It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are." -Ovid ***** "God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown." -Friedrich Neitzsche ***** "Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable." -H. L. Mencken ***** "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me." -Robert Frost ***** "You must believe in God, in spite of what the clergy say." -Benjamin Jowett ***** "There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "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 ***** "God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach." -Heywood Broun ***** "I fear God, and next to God I chiefly fear him who fears Him not." -Saadi ***** "Two men please God--who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not." -Nikita Ivanovich Panin Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment." -Voltaire ***** "They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse." -Emily Dickinson ***** "An honest god is the noblest work of man." -Robert G. Ingersoll ***** "God will forgive me; it is his trade." -Heinrich Heine ***** "I'm still an atheist, thank God." -Luis Bunuel ***** "How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?" -Woody Allen ***** "Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million." -Mark Twain ***** "God is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things." -Harry Emerson Fosdick ***** "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire ***** "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." -Peter De Vries ***** "A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer ***** "I have made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord,make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." -Voltaire ***** "We can know what God is not, but we cannot know what He is." -Saint Augustine ***** "Superstition is the religion of feeble minds." -Edmund Burke ***** "Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction." -Blaise Pascal ***** "To accept Naturalism is to reject such entities as Cartesian minds, private visual and tactual spaces, angelic beings and God." -D. M. Armstrong Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "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 ***** "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." -Albert Einstein ***** "Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters." -Isaac Bashevis Singer ***** "It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity." -Mahatma Gandhi ***** "Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there." -Mohammed Neguib ***** "Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think." -Arthur Shopenhauer ***** "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." -Dalai Lama ***** "There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action." -Bertrand Russell ***** "What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven." -William Shakespeare ***** "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." -Buddha ***** "To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer." -Saddi ***** "An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise." -Victor Hugo ***** "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." -Thomas Paine ***** "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." -Thomas Paine ***** "There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it." -George Bernard Shaw Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever." -Woody Allen ***** "For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." -Charles Bukowski ***** "Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "The clergy believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyrrany known to the mind of man." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei ***** "Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based." -Ambrose Bierce ***** "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." -Peter De Vries ***** "Faith: not wanting to know what is true." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ***** "religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few." -Stendhal ***** "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 ***** "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." -Albert Einstein ***** "The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven." -Mark Twain ***** "'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued. 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'" -Joseph Heller, Catch22 ***** "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." -Milton Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." -Reinhold Niebuhr ***** "Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." -Ambrose Bierce ***** "I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of." -Clarence Darrow ***** "I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." -Wilson Mizner ***** "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -Albert Einstein ***** "Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?" -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ***** "Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God." -Jean Rostand ***** "I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability." -Oscar Wilde ***** "If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can." -Norman Mailer ***** "I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ***** "In heaven all the interesting people are missing." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ***** "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." -William Hazlitt Click Here to Visit our Sponsor 140 quotes in this category Return to The Quotation Station main page. |