Quotations by Subject

   Religion

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws. -John Adams, 2nd US president (1735-1826)

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, reformer and suffragist (1820-1906)

Trust in Allah, but tie your camel. -Arabic saying

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. -Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. -Dave Barry, author and columnist (1947- )

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity. -Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) [The Devil's Dictionary, 1906]

The object of most prayers is to wangle an advance on good intentions.-Robert Brault

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. -Phillips Brooks, bishop and orator (1835-1893)

Christian ethics are seldom found save in the philosophy of some unbeliever. -Heywood Broun

An athiest is a man with no invisible means of support. John Buchan

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. -Richard Francis Burton, explorer and writer (1821-1890)

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. -Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it. -Charles Caleb Cotton

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty. Ilka Chase

The Christian idea has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.-G. K. Chesterton

Coincidences are spiritual puns. -G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse. -Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)

My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own. -William Orville Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case --Finley Peter Dunne

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His. -Roger Ebert, film-critic (1942- )

You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion. -Meister Eckhart, theologian (c. 1260-1327)

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. -Albert Einstein

God is subtle, but he is not malicious. -Albert Einstein.

God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another. -Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion. -Samuel James Ervin Jr., lawyer, judge, and senator
(1896-1985)

Regardless of whether there is such a thing as heaven or hell, it is preferable to do good deeds.-Ethiopian Proverb

Bestir yourself and then call on the gods, for heaven helps the man that laboureth. - Euripides in "Fragments

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. -Ludwig Feuerbach, philosopher (1804-1872)

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth. -Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher and author (1878-1969)

The deeds you do today may be the only sermon some people will hear today. -St. Francis of Assisi

Don't judge men's wealth or godliness by their Sunday appearance. -Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)

'Religion is a common form of mental illness' - Freud

Frisbeetarianism, n.: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper. -R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)

There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread. -Mahatma Gandhi

God has no religion. -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further. -Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures. -Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. -Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

God never occurs to you in person but always in action. -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and scientist (1749-1832)

Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and scientist (1749-1832)

To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.-Aurobindo Ghose, Indian philosopher (1872-1950)

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt. -Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. -Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author(1743-1826)

God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I? -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.--Arthur Koestler

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. -Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )

I care not for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it. -Abraham Lincoln

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, Minority REPORT, 1956.

In men whom men condemn as ill/I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine/I find so much of sin and blot,
I do not dare to draw the line/Between the two, where God has not .Joachim Miller

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven. -John Milton

O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by the dozen! -Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a flea, yet makes gods by the dozens. -Montaigne

If triangles had a God, he would have 3 sides. -Montesquieu

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed. -Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. -John Morley, statesman and writer (1838-1923)

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.--Lord John Morley, statesman and writer (1838-1923)

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess. -Louis Nizer, lawyer (1902-1994)

The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. -Thomas Paine

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.-Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. -Robert T. Pirsig, author and philosopher (1928- )

Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore. -- Russian Proverb

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer. -Saadi, poet (c. 1200 AD)

The beloved of the Almighty are the rich who have the humility of the poor, and the poor who have the magnanimity of the rich. -Saadi, poet (1184-1291)

The deeds you do today may be the only sermon some people will hear today. -St. Francis of Assisi

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

Lord, grant that we may always be in the right, for thou knowest we will never change our minds- Scottish prayer

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. -William Shakespeare, poet and dramatist (1564-1616)

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. -Spanish proverb

I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile. -- Billy Sunday

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another. -Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745)

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. -James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (1894-1961)

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. --  Thomas Szasz

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author 

I once wanted to become an atheist but I gave up . . . they have no holidays--Henny Youngman

God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh. -Voltaire (1694-1778)

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated. -Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes

In the faces of men and women I see God. -Walt Whitman, poet (1819-1892)

So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs. -Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet (1850-1919)

Black holes are where God divided by zero. -Steven Wright, comedian (1955-)

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.-Henny Youngman, comedian, actor (1906-1998)

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Anonymous Graffito:
God is not dead but alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project.

God gave us two ends. One to sit on and one to think with. Success depends on which one you use; heads you win-tails you lose.

Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.

O Lord, protect me from those to whom you speak directly.

Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.