Religion Quotes - Page 95

Professor Langdon,' called a young man with curly hair in the back row, 'if Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?''Well, if you were to ask a Mason, he would offer the following definition: Masonry is a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.''Sounds to me like a euphemism for "freaky cult." ''Freaky, you say?''Hell yes!' the kid said, standing up. 'I heard what they do inside those secret buildings! Weird candlelight rituals with coffins, and nooses, and drinking wine out of skulls. Now that's freaky!'Langdon scanned the class. 'Does that sound freaky to anyone else?''Yes!' they all chimed in.Langdon feigned a sad sigh. 'Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult.'Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. 'You're in a cult?'Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.'The class looked horrified.Langdon shrugged. 'And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.'The classroom remained silent.Langdon winked. 'Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.

Dan Brown

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.

C.S. Lewis

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!

Douglas Adams

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

Robert A. Heinlein

I don't pray because it doesn't work. Prayer doesn't fix anything. Bad things happen anyway.

Nicholas Sparks

Your daily life is your temple and your religion.

Kahlil Gibran

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Mark Twain

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Richard Dawkins

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

Jules Verne

The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.

Dan Barker

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Umberto Eco

The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.

Aldous Huxley

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

George Gordon Byron

I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.Let God worry about your modesty I want to see your enthusiasm.

Robert Farrar Capon

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.

Richard Francis Burton

Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.

Bob Pierce

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.

Vine Deloria Jr.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Isaac Asimov

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said.An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Stephen Hawking

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

Isaac Newton

I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same fifty percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't...Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe...same as the voodoo lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same...so just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself...

George Carlin

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The thought manifests the word;The word manifests the deed;The deed develops into habit;And habit hardens into character;So watch the thought and its ways with care,And let them spring forth from loveBorn out of compassion for all beings.As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.

Juan Mascaró

Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.

John Piper

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

Frank Zappa

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.

Voltairine de Cleyre

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.

Arthur C. Clarke

Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.

Abigail Adams

The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!

Harvey Milk

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

Emma Goldman

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.

Thomas Paine

The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn't for any religious reasons. They couldn't find three wise men and a virgin.

Jay Leno

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.

Ruth Hurmence Green

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

Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.

Jasper Fforde

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

Edmond de Goncourt

Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.

Mahatma Gandhi

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Your way of life is sinful and wrong," he said fiercely.Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear.

P.C. Cast

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Denis Diderot

There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.

Frank Zappa

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Carl Sagan

But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.

C.S. Lewis

[Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Richard Dawkins

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

Robert Anton Wilson

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

Robert A. Heinlein

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries

Richard Dawkins

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Ray Bradbury

Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

C.S. Lewis

I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.

Martin Luther

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

George Bernard Shaw

It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.

Neil Gaiman

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Umberto Eco

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

What has he found who has lost God?And what has he lost who has found God?

Ibn 'Ata'illah al-Iskandari

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

Christopher Hitchens

Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.

Yann Martel

Previous 1 … 93 94 95 96 97 … 116 Next

Religion Quotes - Page 95

Related Topics