Quotes About Religion

It's down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, in the way you treat other people. It's honesty, and unselfishness, and kindness. Especially kindness.

Albert Ellingham said knowledge was his religion and libraries were his church, so he built a church.

so you see, Roark though it is to be a religious edifice, it is also more than that. you notice that we call it the temple of the human spirit. We want to capture- in stone, as others capture in music- not some narrow creed, but the essence of all religion. and what is the essence of religion? The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. the great life giving force of the universe. The heroic human spirit.

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ethics, the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach.

The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When

These supposedly better-for-women dictators were not opposed to imprisoning women or using sexual violence—gang rapes, virginity checks—to punish women who opposed them. For women who wanted more—more dignity, more public and civic influence, more room to practice their religion—the status quo had no room for them.

Islam was too big a religion for such constraints against women, and too noble a religion to countenance viewing non-Muslims with contempt, she thought.

The problem is that political Islam believes in Caliphate.

By not wearing it," he continued, "you also make things harder for other Muslim women. They see you not wearing it and it plants doubt in their mind…they think to themselves, 'If others don't wear it, why should I?'

She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination.

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

Long-haired preachers come out every night And they tell you what's wrong and what's right And when you ask them for something to eat They tell you in voices so sweet: You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die. That's a lie!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.' So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly ironic, which on rare occasions, and this was one of them, bordered on the burlesque.

Leftists' mustaches covered their upper lips, to distinguish them from the Muslims, who carved out a razor-thin line between upper lip and mustache. Some Muslims also grew beards or what stubble they could muster. The leftist women wore khaki or dull green—large, loose shirts over loose trousers—and the Muslim girls scarves or chadors. In between these two immutable rivers stood the non-political students, who were all mechanically branded as monarchists.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.

Now that the mullahs ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power, an ideology. It was this ideological approach to faith that differentiated those in power from millions of ordinary citizens, believers like Mahshid, Manna and Yassi, who found the Islamic Republic their worst enemy.

It was not the worst war in the world, although it left over a million dead and injured. At first the war seemed to pull the divided country together: we were all Iranian and the enemy had attacked our homeland. But even in this, many were not allowed to participate fully. From the regime's point of view, the enemy had attacked not just Iran; it had attacked the Islamic Republic, and it had attacked Islam.

We are not against cinema," Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, "we are against prostitution!")

It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.