We are gods but we are afraid of the ensuing responsibility; that's why we prefer to remain slaves. Only if we dared to rise up to the challenge and assume our divinity, we could perform most of the miracles we pray for.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Billions of years before I was born I did not need religion, why should I need it, billions of years after I cease to exist

Bangambiki Habyarimana

God does not take sides. He is always on the side of the winner

Bangambiki Habyarimana

I am not afraid of what god can do to me. He is already doing it

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Don't be alarmed, the god I am trying to kill is the one I hate, not the one I love

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Life is stripped of its flavor when folks are told that hell is waiting for them

Bangambiki Habyarimana

False prophet: A prophet whose god is not yet known

Bangambiki Habyarimana

God is what you imagine him to be

Bangambiki Habyarimana

A man can feel pain in an amputated arm (an arm that is not there). A man can also feel anxious when he thinks about how his soul will burn in the fire of hell when he is threatened by it though he cannot see it physically

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If you are willing to kill for your beliefs, you are a murderer; if you are willing to die for your beliefs, you are a martyr.

Matshona Dhliwayo

I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.

Ann Patchett

I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THE THING I DO NOT WHAT MY COMMUNITY OR RELIGION DOES.

merlin8thomas

Religious discrimination is not like racial discrimination. One you choose for yourself, the other God chose for you.

Habeeb Akande

At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races... More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class... People began to realise how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what is belied to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself.

Vasily Grossman

If you are religious, you believe that your religion is the 'right' one—and, in many cases, all others will be sent to hell. Similarly, a nationalist believes his or her nation is better or more advanced—and a racist believes that an inherent difference between each race make his or her ethnicity superior. All of these ideologies spawn the hate, philosophical disagreements, and prejudices that have been the catalysts for various atrocious acts throughout history.

David G. McAfee

Racism and religious bigotry are two essential pieces of baggage mankind carries as it moves from one century to the next.

R.N. Prasher

I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

Alexander H. Stephens

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them.

Alexander H. Stephens

We need to accept that our skin colour, our race, beliefs, our genders does not separate us, we stand as one, one united person, let us unite!

Anon1467

We are equal, we re all Humans, we are all related in some way. It doesn't matter what colour our skins is, our race, beliefs, gender, age, we are all equal. I say now is the right time to unite, if we do not unite soon something bads gonna happen

Anon1467

Democracy, religion, education and terrorism have all become practicable norms all over the world – thanks to globalization

Tony Osborg

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

Geoffrey Wood

The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.

Umberto Eco

I am blessed to live in a democracy, not a totalitarian state. But the democracy I cherish is constantly threatened by a brand of politics that clothes avarice and the arrogance of power in patriotic and religious garb.

Parker J. Palmer

A democracy is not truly democratic unless it's secular.

Shawn Lawrence Otto

We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn’t hear, or wouldn’t believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.

Patricia Storace

In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to control their lives than the fear of punishment for lawbreaking.

Livy

When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don't know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God's eyes; as the priests said, 'All that rabble who are not experts in the Torah are accursed.' and as this pride increases, the 'subject' or study which confers such privilege will grow more and more complicated, the list of things forbidden will increase, till to get through a single day without supposed sin becomes like an elaborate step-dance, and this horrible network breeds self-righteousness in some and haunting anxiety in others.

C.S. Lewis

The more we listen to the voices of others, voices unlike our own, the more we remain open to the transcendent forces that save us from idolatry. The more we listen to ourselves, the more we create God in our own image until God becomes a tawdry idol that looks and speaks like us. The power of the commandments is found not in the writings of theologians, although I read and admire some, but in the pathos of human life, including lives that are very unlike our own. All states and nations work to pervert religions into civic religions, ones where the goals of the state become the goals of the divine. This is increasingly true in the United States. But once we believe we understand the will of God and can act as agents of God we become dangerous, a menace to others and a menace to ourselves. We forget that we do not understand. We forget to listen.

Chris Hedges

The system is religion, the law is spirituality. Take your pick.

John Martel

So, Andrew, what you are basically saying is that the theological issue regarding homosexuality boils down to a disagreement between those who think that the sodomy laws are part of Levitical code about cleanliness, holiness and ritual purity, which are not binding on Christians, and those who think that they are part of a more general moral law, which is." I guess I am. "Gee. It's so simple when you put it like that. Why didn't the Archbishop of Canterbury explain it at the beginning and save us all a lot of trouble?" I don't know. But if it turned out that he didn't think that understanding the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament was very important; or that he didn't think that the people in the pew really cared very much about the difference between Law and Grace, or if – if – he himself doesn't believe in it – then I would be very worried indeed.

Andrew Rilstone

Now from science we have a new creation story, which is very alluring and very exciting. It's not about deposing all the other wisdom stories about creation that humanity has gathered, but it certainly supplements it. It offers a real universal view because it's beyond any particular religion, ethnicity, nation and so forth. As we're struggling as a species to come together as a tribe, it provides us our basic framework, because it's from creation stories that ethics derive. Today's creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe. We all share the same atoms and the same molecules. That's truly significant and important at this time in history. We're all kin, we're all interdependent. And that's the basis of compassion, which was Jesus's ultimate teaching.

David L. Felten

For modern cosmology God cannot be a working hypothesis because God is not given to us in the observable nature of things. The poetic and theological idea that the universe is an expression of God's creative power is false. And yet the possibility that underlying the nature of things is an undiscoverable force of unimaginable simplicity that one may call God haunts and frustrates modern science. If this principle exists, then it cannot be different from our experience of it: it must be inherent, not transcendent; purely natural, therefore, not a violation of its own being, and hence intelligent, in the sense it requires coherence rather than chaos and confusion to exist at all--as the ancient myths tell us; impersonal to the extent that we cannot attribute moral purposes or even will, classically understood, to what we can observe of its operations. It is entirely coextensive and if it has a limit coterminous with what is--a perception that dates in theology from Anselm to Tillich and in natural philosophy from Democritus to Planck. It does not exist in gaps of undiscovered data or models or as an unsolved mystery but in the givenness of the world and the intelligent life form that has arisen to ponder it.

R. Joseph Hoffmann

God didn't make Eve from Adam's rib. He took out half of Adam's brain by accident.

Shirley Jump

The existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then the prediction is not confirmed.

Victor J. Stenger

If you stay on this path as long as I have, you’ll soon learn that the road to providence leads right through perdition. And along that road, the devil’s waiting to collect his pound of flesh.

Jay Grewal

The main point of enlightenment is man's release from his self-caused immaturity, primarily in matters of religion.

Immanuel Kant

The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae (the son of the Sun and Moon) is the possible result as well as the symbol of this union of opposites. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. "It has a thousand names," say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal toward which it aims is nameless, ineffable.

C.G. Jung

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Joseph de Maistre

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

Laurie Lee

Men have sacrificed so much for their beliefs. Country. Kings. Queens. Political systems. God. Love . It doesn’t seem very noble to simply let something you believe in, someone you love, just walk away. To give up without a fight.

Dan Skinner

Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which civilization claimed to be based. The bargain, Rivers though, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies were founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.

Pat Barker

It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune, one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.

Victor Hugo

All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.

Iain Banks

In every religion; a true love is the love for the God, in mine it is for you.

M.F. Moonzajer

Some of the best mysteries end in a love story.

Shannon L. Alder

Vision is the end of religion.

William Blake

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Dorothy L. Sayers

People perceive the divine according to their own biases. That doesn’t make the experience any less real.

James Rozoff

That which is capable of perceiving objective reality is, in Sufism, the human soul (ruh).

Idries Shah

All forms are limited. Some of the limitations are time, place, culture, language.

Idries Shah

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Religion Quotes - Page 16

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