After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Religion
Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.
Michel de Montaigne – Religion
There are few men who dare to publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God.
Michel de Montaigne – Religion, Prayer
The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.
Religion, Resistance – Edmund Burke
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.
Religion – Edmund Burke
If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
Voltaire – England, Religion
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Sigmund Freud – Knowledge, Religion
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sigmund Freud – Religion
Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
Sigmund Freud – Rational Thought
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and imagemakers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
George Bernard Shaw – Religion
I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man
Mark Twain – Religion, Politics
Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.
Habermas on Religion
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
Walter Benjamin – Religion
When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.
Abraham Lincoln – Religion
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
