Quotations: God/Religion

***** "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."-Buddha

***** "Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith."-Thomas Jefferson

***** "'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued. 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'"-Joseph Heller, Catch22

***** "The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,Is my vision's greatest enemy.Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.Thine loves the same world that mine hates,Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates."-William Blake

***** "The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science --or any honest intellectual inquiry."-Stephen J. Gould

***** "If God created flawed beings, how then can He go on to blame them for their flaws?"-James Halloran

***** "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on TheeAnd I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."-Robert Frost

***** "There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He."-Friedrich Nietzsche

***** "Two men please God--who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not."-Nikita Ivanovich Panin

***** "If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment."-Voltaire

***** "An honest god is the noblest work of man."-Robert G. Ingersoll

***** "Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million."-Mark Twain

***** "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."-Voltaire

***** "Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction."-Blaise Pascal

***** "Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there."-Mohammed Neguib

***** "Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."-Arthur Shopenhauer

**** "What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity."-Friedrich Nietzsche

***** "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven."-William Shakespeare

***** "To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer."-Saddi

***** "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."-Thomas Paine

***** "There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."-George Bernard Shaw

***** "Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."-Thomas Jefferson

***** "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."-Galileo Galilei

***** "Faith: not wanting to know what is true."-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

***** "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."-Reinhold Niebuhr

***** "Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God."-Jean Rostand

***** "If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can."-Norman Mailer

***** "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."-John Morley

***** "Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven."-Mark Twain