Religious quotes
7.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside religious — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him."
"To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language."
"Christians aren't making a religious claim when they say Jesus rose from the grave. They're making a historical one; they're saying that this thing happened just as surely and really as it happened that Julius Caesar became emperor of Rome. It's the kind of claim that can be thought about and investigated; it can be judged."
"The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It's been increasing since 1980 but it's a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women's rights."
"E have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand."
"Won't you look down upon me Jesus, you've got to help me make a stand. You just got to see me through another day."
"I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worse possible corruption. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul."
"Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard."
"Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves."
"If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time."
"Dying man couldn't make up his mind which place to go to-both have their advantages, heaven for the climate, hell for the company!"
"Religious contention is the devil's harvest."
"We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality."
"I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits.... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum."
"For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril."
"Voters are more than Catholics, Protestants or Jews. They make up their minds for many diverse reasons, good and bad. To submit the candidates to a religious test is unfair enough - to apply it to the voters is divisive, degrading and wholly unwarranted."
"Everybody's talking about ministers, sinisters, banisters, and canisters, bishops, fishops, rabbis, and popeyes, bye-bye, bye-byes."
"He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety."
"So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized."
"If God were not to test us, there would be no patience."
