Quotes About Religion

Is not Christianity something altogether simpler than this? Have not all dogmas been successfully dissolved by literary tact? Is not religion just "morality touched with emotion," just precepts of good living, only "heightened and lit up by feeling"? Well, that Stoicism answered more or less to this description we have already seen; it was a system of morals that at times put on an emotional dress and masqueraded as a religion, and by stripping off this dress we lose no characteristic feature.

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.

Shiism is already and of itself the spiritual way, the ?ar?qah —that is to say, initiation.

Dick believed that we all live in a world where 'spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups - and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.

In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick's future, not George Orwell's or Aldous Huxley's ... Dick believed that we all live in a world where 'spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political group - and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.

Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Your religion...serves you only for an excuse for your faults, but is no incentive to your virtue.

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.

A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because "people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.

Balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of states became the basis of international law and diplomacy. China, by contrast, was never engaged in sustained contact with another country on the basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered societies of comparable culture or magnitude.

Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire's truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.

The Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe's pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is "weaponized" in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation.

As "the East," it has never been clearly parallel to "the West." There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia.

Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.

Action, and not knowledge, is man's destiny and duty in this life; and his highest principles, both in philosophy and in religion, have reference to this end.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinkin

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

To many of these writers, planning became not just an approach to strategy formation but a virtual religion to be promulgated with the fervor of missionaries.

Since man is a moral being, his culture cannot be a-moral. Because man is a religious being, his culture, too, must be religiously oriented.