c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, and by accepting–and embracing–the theory of evolution, Christians and conservatives strengthen their religion, their politics, and science itself. The conflict between science and religion is senseless. It is based on fears and misunderstandings rather than on facts and moral wisdom. (138)
— Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design
For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy
God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.
— Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.
— Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges
Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?" "Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen," Dane said."And what," Moore said, "if a large part of the reason they're so tenacious is that they're perfectly accurate?
— China Miéville, Kraken
Fundamentalism's strident denunciation of its opponents is a sign of its weakness, its dogmatic authoritarianism is a pathological mutation of faith.
— Alan Aldridge
But we as a culture have lost the deep intuitive understanding that Creation exists on many levels. We have succumbed to the scientific viewpoint. Nothing characterizes ‘the modern world’ more completely than the loss of faith in Transcendence, our arrogant lack of any genuine appreciation for levels of reality above our little everyday affairs. The deepest wounds to the human soul have been caused by our lack of appreciation of levels. By shutting the door on transcendence, we have cut off any light from that world that might have illuminated this one, leaving us in darkness,leaving us with nothing but a dead world where scientists are merely performing an autopsy.
— Andrew Cort, Love, Wisdom, and God: The Longing of the Western Soul
Faith does not imply a closed, but an open mind. Quite the opposite of blindness, faith appreciates the vast spiritual realities that materialist overlook by getting trapped in the purely physical.
— John Marks Templeton
A life without an objective is much like a ship at sea with no port in mind. It drifts with the waves or storms, or with the whim of the captain. They are tempted to ask, amidst the battles of life, "Is the struggle worth-while?" That attitude lessens the joy of living. They who say that there is no purpose in life are not unhappy, but become dangerous to themselves and others, for they have no safe guide for their actions. Indeed, life has not objective save physical satisfactions, it is empty and valueless.
— John A. Widtsoe, An Understandable Religion
When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?''I am sorry... I fear not.''You see where you are now!
— Charles S. Ricketts, Oscar Wilde: Recollections by Jean Paul Raymond
Men, discouraged by their failure to accomplish exactly what they desire, often speak of their lives as purposeless, but it is idle talk, for, in fact, no intelligent life which concerns itself vigorously and properly with the things about it can be said to be purposeless. Such a life adheres, automatically, to the law of progression, and therefore moves toward a great destiny of supreme power and accompanying joys. The only purposeless life is the one that does not use its faculties. It matters little what tasks men perform in life, if only they do them well and will all their strength. In the eternal plan they are given progressive value. In an infinite universe, one cannot possibly learn all or do all, at once. A beginning must be made somewhere and corner by corner, department by department, space by space, all will be known and conquered. In the end, all must be explored, and whether one begins in the east or the west cannot matter much. The big concern is the extent to which a man offers himself, mind and body, to his worthwhile work. Upon that will growth depend.
— John A. Widtsoe, Rational Theology
In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.
— Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
We are aware that the order of God requires the exercise of humility, but not of servility of slaves; but a humility that can be associated with undoubted courage and unflinching integrity; at the same time there is no room for pride, self-sufficient pride, that rests solely upon its own capabilities, and refuses to look for the support and countenance of others.--MS 7:91 [MS is the Millenial Star]
— John A. Widtsoe, Priesthood and Church Government
In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
— Clifford Geertz
This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.
— Isaac Newton, Opticks
The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
We believe that religions are basically the same…they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.
— Steve Turner, Up To Date
It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...
— Emil M. Cioran
Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.
— Huston Smith
Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.
— Walter Kaufmann
The old-time-religion and today's cutting-edge-religion have one thing in common - they're both religion. I want neither.
— Steve McVey
Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.
— Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch
The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
On the exoteric level the traditions are irreconcilable. On the esoteric, experiential level of the heart reigns an eloquent, reverential silence.
— Frederick Franck, A Little Compendium on That Which Matters
O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
— W.B. Yeats
I hallowed out my Bible to put another, smaller Bible inside.
— Christy Leigh Stewart
The agony of martyrdom is almost too much to bear. In the early hours, when the loss is fresh, there is no comfort in knowing Glory will live on. We speak of the martyrs in History but we cannot know the actual pain they suffered in their final living hours. They enter the realm of the mythic, but we must never forget these were men like ourselves. When their flesh is torn, they cry out. They suffer as you or I would suffer, although more bravely. Remember Christ. Although I am now an enemy to Joseph's legacy, I shudder when recalling his pain.
— David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife
What is it about our specific belief in God and His wishes that makes us so angry at the specific beliefs of another? What is it about the teachings of our respective deities that makes us more right than the next person? Or more wrong?
— Chuck Austen
More people have died in the name of religion than have ever died of cancer. And we try to cure cancer... What makes us take up arms against those who pray to the same God with different words?
— Chuck Austen
(Priests) cheapjack merchants selling paradise
— Jean Lorrain
God withholds Himself from no one who perseveres.
— Teresa of Ávila
As I sit, my back leaning against a damp, moss-covered tree trunk, my eyes sweeping the canopy above, my ears straining to catch the crack of a distant branch that betrays an orangutan moving in the treetops, I think about how we humans search for God. The tropical rain forest is the most complex thing an ordinary human can experience on this planet. A walk in the rain forest is a walk into the mind of God.
— Biruté M.F. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo
The real bible is not the work of inspired men, nor prophets, nor apostles, nor evangelists, nor of Christs. Every man who finds a fact, adds, as it were, a word to this great book. It is not attested by prophecy, by miracles or signs. It makes no appeal to faith, to ignorance, to credulity or fear. It has no punishment for unbelief, and no reward for hypocrisy. It appeals to man in the name of demonstration. It has nothing to conceal. It has no fear of being read, of being contradicted, of being investigated and understood. It does not pretend to be holy, or sacred; it simply claims to be true. It challenges the scrutiny of all, and implores every reader to verify every line for himself. It is incapable of being blasphemed. This book appeals to all the surroundings of man. Each thing that exists testifies of its perfection. The earth, with its forests and plains, its rocks and seas; with its every wave and cloud; with its every leaf and bud and flower, confirms its every word, and the solemn stars, shining in the infinite abysses, are the eternal witnesses of its truth.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
We who are given the fullness of true Christianity are obliged to be working on ourselves, to be watching the signs of the times, and to be extremely joyful, as St. Paul is constantly saying: 'Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say: Rejoice!' (Phil. 4:4). We rejoice because we have something which all the death and corruption of this world cannot take away, that is, the eternal Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
— Seraphim Rose
My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers. Compromise may work in politics. It's less appropriate to the realm of faith and belief.
— Randall Balmer, God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush
The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.
— Charles Darwin
Protestantism developed its sense of identity primarily in response to external threats and criticisms rather than as a result of shared beliefs. In one sense, the idea of "Protestantism" can be seen as the creation of its opponents rather than of its supporters.
— Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
The will of God or the lunacy of man - it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God.
— James Hilton
for what is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?
— James W. Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack
Our lord is a magic lord as we all desired, and magical things have sought him from over there, and they all obey his hests.""It is so," said all but Gazic. And Gazic rose up in a pause of their gladness. "Many strange things," he said, "have entered our village, coming from over there. And it may be that human folk are best, and the ways of the fields we know.
— Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
— Samuel Johnson
[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story."What do you mean?"Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists... same old, same old. It seems to me that the book, at this point, bears witness to all that.
— Geraldine Brooks
Manz, formerly one of Zwingli's closest allies, held that there was no biblical warrant for infant baptism. Refusing to recant his views, he was tied up and drowned in the River Limmat.
— Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
...like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.
— Mark Slouka, God's Fool
It is as if a Mohammedan, while recognizing the divine mission of the Arab prophet, were to write for his son a treatise on the ethics of the New Testament as better adapted than the moral system of the Koran for the training and confirming of a young man in the practice of virtue.
— Andrew P. Peabody, Selections from the Writings of Cicero
derelict. my voice cracked and yolk poured out. wind chimes rigid, no breeze, no song. my wings found hidden in your suitcase. pleas for help mistaken for a swan song. i'm stuffing pages from my journal down my throat as kindling. hoping the smoke will get the taste of you out of my mouth. he looks at me from across the room and all i want is to push him against the wall. ravage. ravage. carnage has never been more vogue. is it still art if it doesn't bring you to your knees? lover, let me prey at your altar. let me bare my fangs in praise. don't i look so pretty in a funeral shroud? i keep time with the click of my creaking bones. dance with me under the milky translucence of a world suffocating. how did you find me? i buried myself beneath the cicadas. is a girl trapped in glass still a prize?let me get under your skin. i want to know what your fears taste like. i want to consume.
— Taylor Rhodes, calloused: a field journal
My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you … I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.
— John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Tim Minchin's musings on Tony, the first 'fish' ever to have feet:Imagine what Tony would think, standing there on his brand new feet on the brink of the beginnings of mankind as we know it... if he could look forward just a few short... hundreds of millions of years... to see one of his descendants... an Israeli Jew by the name of Jesus, having a nail hammered through his feet... the very feet that Tony provided him with, as a punishment for having a, sort of, schizophrenic discourse with a God who was created by Mankind to explain the existence of feet in the absence of the knowledge of the existence of Tony.
— Tim Minchin
I love the freedom of my wings. I love the empty space above the ground. I rejoice in my freedom. Freedom is my religion. Peace is my God. Love is my worship.
— Banani Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird
The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
There is nothing like being told to go fuck yourself by the same person who was, only days before, praying on your behalf.
— Henry Rollins
But you do believe, don’t you," Rose implored him, "you think it’s true?"	"Of course it’s true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments." "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe.
— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.
— Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir
People who use their religion as a framework to kill people, simply , are not nice people. Yes, that's quite a stand I'm making, but the idea that people are systematically executed because they don't share your God is beyond barbaric. The fact that there are people in our own country who seem to tolerate that, while being intolerant of a Christian's biblical stance regarding gay marriage, makes me want to go to leave the United States and go to a more sensible place, like Texas. in their conversation when they aren't talking about the Arctic winds, people who bring their own bedroom pillows onto flights, pharmacists who yell out your prescription in front of other customers, Time Warner Cable, Sting's chest hair) but I'll get into that later.... I may not do that...though, because I refuse to tolerate lists. They're lazy. And listy.
— Greg Gutfeld, The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence...and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
— Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
If the way of wisdom was easy, anyone would have walked in. Wisdom is not a whore she is a shy mademoiselle so only those who strives wins her heart.
— Rajesh Nanoo
The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.“Nothing about religion is simple.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
America isn’t perfect but there’s not a better place in the world for people of any faith.
— Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season
I don't ridicule religion, it ridicules itself.
— Bill Maher
It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Religion? and Other New Articles and Letters
Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgement was coiled. Real people with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.
— Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays
Some people have a heart to do evil and they don’t care if you’re Muslim or Christian.
— Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.
— Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
The teachings of a religion should influence the personality and daily conduct of each believer. Thus, each person's conduct will normally be a reflection, to a greater or lesser degree, of that one's religious background. What effect does your religion have on you? Does your religion produce a kinder person? More generous, honest, humble, tolerant, and compassionate?
— Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Mankind’s Search for God
Men die in battle women die in childbirth. 
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
Religion starts with desolation and ends with misery.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets.
— Mark  Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God
The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.
— Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen
I trust, and I recognize the beneficence of the power which we all worship as supreme- Order, Fate, the Great Spirit, Nature, God. I recognize this power in the sun that makes all things grow and keeps life afoot. I make a friend of this indefinable force…this is my religion of optimism.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
It will take centuries to disconnect people from an addiction like religion; no matter how bad and disastrous it could be, but addiction is the worst of all.
— M.F. Moonzajer
If religion has nothing to do with poverty and misery then why the Muslims are the largest charity takers of the world 
— M.F. Moonzajer
You know,” said Jehangir, breaking the silence, “it's only Muslims who use the term 'innovation' to mean something bad.
— Michael Muhammad Knight, The Taqwacores
Freedom of religion is not enough; we need the extinction of it, because no one has turned to be a religious by their own choice.
— M.F. Moonzajer
The more he needs God, the more deeply he comprehends he is in need of God, and then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is... To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself.
— Søren Kierkegaard
The thing I hate about religion is, they ban what they have done and force us to do what they haven’t done.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Yesterday is the last day of the past. Tomorrow is brimming with hope, so today is meant to lived large. Enjoy your moments!
— David Grachek
When we remember our identity in Christ, it changes the way we see these relationships because we no longer base our worth on the approval of others but the approval we have already received from our Father through the work of His son.
— Amy E. Spiegel, Letting Go of Perfect: Women, Expectations, and Authenticity
Religion is the servant of the vanishing; science, of the existence! Disappearance belongs to the chaos and the Devil; existence, to the God!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For God’s sake, take the religion out of your life or all kind of absurdities will take the reason out of your life! Keep God, get rid of religion! God, Love and Science; the Magnificent Trinity! All you need is these three things!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Religion reminds me of a lace condom. While lovingly crafted, it’s not designed for pleasure; unless inflated with fervour, it collapses; one size does not fit all; and no matter how many times you dunk it in holy water, it will not prevent misconceptions or contagion.
— Lowestoft Thellow
If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.
— Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
If one does not make an ego out of gender, one would still know whether one is a man or a woman, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender—whatever else we may think of. But those identities need to fit very loosely and be worn very lightly. All sense of privilege or deprivation that has developed around one’s gender identity, all rigidity regarding proper roles and behaviors for the various genders, must be cut through.
— Rita M. Gross
A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
— Ricky Gervais
How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.
— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
You frighten me, when you say there isn't time.""I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.""But it keeps not ending.""So far, so good.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor
Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'".
— Alan Lightman, Mr g: A Novel About The Creation
The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
You were baptized?""My sister told me that yes, Father baptized me shortly after birth. My mother was a Protestant of a faith that deplored infant baptism, so they had a quarrel about it." The Bishop held out his hand to lift the Speaker to his feet. The Speaker chuckled. "Imagine. A closet Catholic and a lapsed Mormon, quarreling over religious procedures that they both claimed not to believe in.
— Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor," the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.The Speaker's smile was just as chilly. "And you're the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn't talk to me.
— Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor
A man who believes everything can be explained by science is just as ignorant as someone who believes everything can be explained by religion.
— Zack W. Van
Sećam se da sam jedno jutro video ispred samoposluge nekog popa kako ljušti kikiriki, odmah mi je bilo jasno da neće biti mira na Balkanu.
— Slobodan Tišma, Starost
Lets be sheep of God, not sheep of men.
— Kristy Robles
If Jesus came back and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing-up.
— Woody Allen
Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the 'last days' before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they took as certain proof that the Apocalypse was imminent. Again like fundamentalists today, they looked on the prospect of the violent destruction of mankind without turning a hair. The remarkable similarity between the first Tudor Puritans and the fanatics among today's Christian fundamentalists extends to their selective reading of the Bible, their emphasis on the Book of Revelation, their certainty of their rightness, even to their phraseology. Where the Book of Revelation is concerned, I share the view of Guy, that the early church fathers released something very dangerous on the world when, after much deliberation, they decided to include it in the Christian canon."]
— C.J. Sansom, Revelation
The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.
— Christopher Hitchens
Während Wissenschaftler wissen, dass sie nur etwas "glauben" (= für "wahr" halten), was heute angemessen erscheint, morgen aber möglicherweise schon überholt ist, glauben Gläubige, etwas zu wissen, was auch morgen noch gültig sein soll, obwohl es in der Regel schon heute widerlegt ist.
— Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Manifest des evolutionären Humanismus
My God can do it! My God will do it! My God wants to do it! My God has done it!
— Kathy Degraw
Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
— Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all, said Thor
— Orson Scott Card, The Lost Gate
...aconsejaría yo a los que tienen oración, en especial al principio, procuren amistad y trato con otras personas que traten de lo mismo. Es cosa importantísima, aunque no sea sino ayudarse unos a otros con sus oraciones, ¡cuánto más que hay muchas más ganancias! Y no sé yo por qué no se ha de permitir que quien comenzare de veras a amar a Dios y a servirle, deje de tratar con algunas personas sus placeres y trabajos, que de todo tienen los que tienen oración.
— Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself
To quit religion is to start walking in the space! Don’t be afraid, you don’t fall into the void, because you can hold onto God and science!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
But when I make a good [taxidermy] mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let such critter be dead, and I said, 'Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.
— Christopher Buehlman, Those Across the River
Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive.
— Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
To me, my husband was my son’s murderer. He was also my daughter’s molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin every night. He was Bhai’s destroyer, Amma Sain’s tormentor, Ma’s humbler and the people’s exploiter. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed on the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us.
— Tehmina Durrani, Blasphemy
This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.
— Julius Evola
Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..
— T.S. Eliot
I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.
— Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.
— Julius Evola
All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty—and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally.
— Sam Harris
Today everybody admits that something is wrong with the world, and the critics of Christianity are the very people who feel this most. The most violent attacks on religion come from those who are most anxious to change the world, and they attack Christianity because they think that it is an obstructive force that stands in the way of a real reform of human life. There has seldom been a time in which men were more dissatisfied with life and the more conscious of the need for deliverance, and if they turn away from Christianity it is because they feel that Christianity is a servant of the established order and that it has no real power or will to change the world and to rescue man from his present difficulties. They have lost their faith in the old spiritual traditions that inspired civilization in the past, and they tend to look for a solution in some external practical remedy such as communism, or the scientific organisation of life; something definite and objective that can be applied to society as a whole.
— Christopher Henry Dawson, Religion and World History: A Selection from the Works of Christopher Dawson
He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me that he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to him. But it wasn't my fault. It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business gentleman, or it was a God I cannot worship.
— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
Pure intuitive faith differs as much from fanaticism as fire from smoke, or music from mere noise; those who confuse the two are like the deaf.
— José Rizal
The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic disease in the Catholic Church.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
For me, the existence of nonexistence of God is a nonissue.
— Greg Graffin, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God
What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. 
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
And if it is a mystery, then we, too, had the right to preach mystery and to teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but the mystery, which they must blindly obey, even setting aside their own conscience. And so we did. We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.
— E.J. Dionne Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right
No hay palanca más poderosa que una creencia para mover las multitudes humanas no en vano se dice que la religión liga y aprieta a los hombres 
— Emilia Pardo Bazán
I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent.
— Robert M. Price
Religion now has degenerated and it has turned into a wolf; it has opened its mouth to show his ugly teeth; its spreading fear instead of love; and science has hidden in a corner like a lamb, trembling with fear!
— Mehmet Murat ildan, Galileo Galilei
By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.
— Peter Rollins
I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.
— Lao Tzu
Why do so many today want to wander off to South Africa or Kenya or India or Russia or Honduras or Costa Rica or Peru to help with justice issues but not spend the same effort in their own neighborhood or community or state? Why do young suburbanites, say in Chicago, want to go to Kentucky or Tennessee to help people but not want to spend that same time to go to the inner city in their own area to help with justice issues? I asked this question to a mature student in my office one day, and he thought he had a partial explanation: 'Because my generation is searching for experiences, and the more exotic and extreme the better. Going down the street to help at a food shelter is good and it is just and some of us are doing that, but it's not an experience. We want experiences.
— Scot McKnight
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
My religion is no way of knowing me.
— Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
There is no problem with the wider culture that you cannot see in the spades in the Christian Church. The rot is in us, and not simple out there. And Christians are making a great mistake by turning everything into culture wars. It's a much deeper crisis.
— Os Guinness
My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city .
— Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.
— Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church
Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.
— James Thurber
If religion is the cornerstone of morality, how come I so often find myself explaining why I don’t hate god to someone who’s expressed hatred for atheists, scientists, feminists, gays, intellectuals, and all other forms of infidels?
— Lindsey Brown
...While grace does do away with the need for good works, it’s grace which also makes good works truly possible. If good works don’t play into your salvation, then doing them is a sheer act of love, both for those they benefit and to God. It’s a way of solving the conundrum of how can a good work be truly good if the doer of the work expects to benefit from it in any way."-David Clark
— David Clark
Si otras culturas han sobrevivido 10,000 años sin las reglas religiosas del islam, mormonismo, hinduismo o cristianismo, ¿cuál es el propósito de las restricciones y la culpa religiosas?
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Religion is not a bridge between God and Man it is the Great Wall of China between them! 
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Time will come and some people will be proud of themselves that they have never believed in any religion! This honour will be belonging to the clever people of the society only! For the others, merely the deep shame will remain!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Petronius says that ‘Mundus vult decipi - The world wants to be deceived.’ That is very true, otherwise there wouldn’t exist any religion!
— Mehmet Murat ildan