Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about religion

498 quotes from 232 people

Most readBy personPage 16 of 34

He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge1772–1834Aids to Reflection (1825), Aphorism 63, p. 89
- Christianity
- Truth & Lies
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 Santayana1863–1952The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. III, Reason in Religion, Ch. VI
- Debate
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
Salman Rushdieborn 1947Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)
- Anti-Religion
- Ideas
The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900The Antichrist (1895), Aphorism 62 (translated by H. L. Mencken, 1918)
- Anti-Religion
- Christianity
Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy.
Thomas Paine1737–1809Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
- Atheism
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Sigmund Freud1856–1939The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 8
- Anti-Religion
- Faith
I am neither a German citizen nor do I believe in anything that can be described as a “Jewish faith.” But I am a Jew and glad to belong to the Jewish people, though I do not regard it in any way as chosen.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Letter to the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (April 1920), as quoted in Alice Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010), p. 195
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty — necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
James Baldwin1924–1987“Letter from a Region of My Mind”
- Anti-Religion
- Christianity
The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigners’ Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.
Frantz Fanon1925–1961The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 7
- Anti-Religion
- Race
Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Marble Faun (1860), Chapter XXXIII: Pictured Windows
- Christianity
- Faith
One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don’t know about the ultimate judgment. It’s beyond your judgment. And if you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
Reinhold Niebuhr1892–1971The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)
It were better to be of no Church, than to be bitter for any.
William Penn1644–1718Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I, 535
Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.
Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)
- Christianity
I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.
Barry Goldwater1909–1998Said in July 1981, on Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell’s opposition to Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court nomination
- Christianity
- Clever Jabs
We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.
Jimmy Carter1924–2024Addressing a Bible class in Plains, Georgia (March 1976), as quoted in Boston Sunday Herald Advertiser (11 April 1976)
- Christianity
- Life & Death