Quotes About Morality

There is no god higher than truth.

What I'm saying in my books boils down to this: Mine religion for what is good and avoid what is deleterious. Don't condemn people who need it. Be very careful when that need becomes fanatical.

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.

Let us be done with the notion that religion is confined to petty pieties and small constraints. All too often people who have possessed these pieties have wrought great evil.

The term that best describes me now is 'secular humanist.'

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

Religion is the venereal disease of mankind.

Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves.

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

We must distinguish between spirituality in general terms, which aims to make us better people, and religion. Adopting a religion remains optional, but becoming a better human being is essential.

Hypocrisy and distortion are passing currents under the name of religion

The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.

I don't believe in heaven and hell. I don't know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life - the only thing I know to exist - to be wasted.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.

If your religion does not make you holy, it will damn you. It is simply painted pageantry to go to hell in.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Churches come and go, but there has ever been but one religion. The only religion is conscience in action.

To be good and to do good-that is the whole of religion.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.