Quotes About Religion

One feature of the trial – as with all other trials – was of course the fact that the jury consisted entirely of Protestants, Catholics being debarred from jury service.

But from the point of view of Catholic Emancipation, it was Pitt's resignation which was the important, inexorable fact. This was the monarch who had agreed to the rights of the French Canadians to their own religion, and was the genuine personal friend of Lord Petre and Thomas Weld. What had happened? The answer was in two parts. Partly he had been preyed on for political reasons by members of his court opposed to Pitt.

On 18 April, five days after the passing of the bill, he took his seat in the House of Lords, with Lord Dormer and Lord Clifford, the first Catholics to do so since the reign of Charles II. There were in fact only eight Catholic peers available – one duke, one earl and six barons – whereas 200 years earlier there had been at least twenty-two. The rest of the titles had one way or another slipped out of Catholic hands.

Neither the Lord Chancellor specifically nor, by implication, the Prime Minister could be Roman Catholics. The latter would be precluded by the clause which forbade any Catholic to advise on ecclesiastical appointments, a duty which comes to the Prime Minister of a country in which there is an officially Established Church.

Catholic priests could not be Members of Parliament.

The fact that Catholic soldiers could die for a country which denied them the worship they wanted was constantly and rightly emphasized during the campaign for Emancipation.

Wolfe Tone proposed that Anti-Catholicism belonged to 'the dark ages of superstition', not 'the days of illumination, at the close of the eighteenth century'.

Once arrived in Rome, Heliogabalus banishes men from the Senate and replaces them with women. To the Romans, this is anarchy, but for the religion of the menses, which originated the Tyrian Purple, and for Heliogabalus who administers it, it's only a simple restoration of balance.

My father made no such division between faith and reason. He understood that the act of faith does not mean the end of thought.

The Catholic Church was the bulwark of the country's conservative forces, the foundation of what the right defined as Spanish civilization. Not surprisingly, the outside world had a fixed impression of Spain as a deeply religious country. The jest of the Basque philosopher Unamuno, that in Spain even atheists were Catholic, was taken seriously. Centuries of fanatical superstition enforced by the Inquisition had engraved this image on European minds.

Cease, daughter! said the priest at last in a trembling voice. I cannot grant absolution, no priest could...

Et ne nos inducas in tentationem. Why should an all-loving father lead his child into temptation? Why must he be implored not to? At that moment in Ursula's drafty chamber, Celia renounced God. She would cease to worry about religion. She would conform to any outward acts which seemed expedient at the time, and she would guide her own life as she saw fit. Her own will and desires should be her sole criteria. All else was inconsistency or downright lies. And nothing was worth suffering for.

It may be a procession of faithful failures that enriches the soil of godly success. Faithful actions are not religious acts. They are not even necessary actions undertaken by people of faith. Faithful actions, whether they are marked by success or they end in failure, are actions that are compelled by goodness.

God is not a Christian.

Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life.

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious.

God is not mocked!

During my sessions with Dr. Morse, I concluded that somebody had been messing with my head during those early years and they left footprints on my brain. I have spent almost as much time on Seventh-Day Adventists in my analysis as I have on my mother. I am willing to bet that this place was responsible for many of my hang-ups.

Good men were not to be made merely by laws which relied for their sanction on force but only by religion and morality, which appealed to the conscience. Only when the people, he wrote, had emptied them-selves of all the lust of selfish will—and without religion it was impossible they should—could absolute power be safely entrusted to the State.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.