- “If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.” ― Salman Rushdie
- “What sort of a God would actually build someone up just to knock them down?” ― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo
- “Don’t they get afraid, then?””They have a religion for that.” ― Ray Bradbury, The October Country
- “When three persons are together, then no two of them should hold secret counselexcluding the third person” ― Prophet Mohammad
- “In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” ― Carl Sagan
- “I need no master to punish me in order to behave as I ought. If I did, I would be no more than a child who obeys his father’s rules only because he fears the whip, and not because he actually means good.” ― Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
- “The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.” ― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
- “I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.” ― Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor
- “Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed.” ― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
- “If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.” ― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter
- “The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul–lust.” ― Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
- “The turmoil and dislocations confronting present-day society will not be solved until both the scientific and religious genius of the human race are fully utilized.” ― Baha’i International Community
- “A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death. Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ.” ― Peter Rollins
- “Confusing religion with spirituality is like confusing education with intelligence.” ― Omar Cherif
- “You may see the disc of Divinity quite clearly through the smoked glass of humanity, but no otherwise.” ― Coventry Patmore
- “Without redemption, there is no repentance” ― Lailah Gifty Akita
- “Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.” ― Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God
- “The world needs the kind of religion that sets humanity free, not the kind that binds it with textual fanaticism. The world needs the kind of religion that humanizes the society, not the kind that dehumanizes it.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism
- “If Jesus came back and saw what was going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing-up.” ― Woody Allen
- “Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.” ― Marquis De Sade
- “Your faith is your conscience, and your conscience is your faith. You cannot have faith without a conscience, but you can have a conscience without faith. Man was designed to be good with or without religion, yet the challenge for many is staying good. Some people claim to be religious but have no conscience, while some people without religion are very much aware of their conscience. Therefore, a religious label does not define your character or validate your worth. In the end, all men will be judged by the amount of truth in them and the weight of their hearts. The heavier the conscience, the heavier the truth. The lighter the heart, the higher it goes. The only spiritual currency one has in the afterlife is amassed in the form of light, in that, the amount you have depends on the weight of your words and deeds in the living. Conscience is everything. Conscience is what connects us to the truth and light of the highest power source of all. God. The cosmic heart of the universe.” ― Suzy Kassem
- “Worshipping images is the religion of the stone-age, helping people is the religion of a civilized society.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Servitude is Sanctitude
- “ويقيني أَن المسيح لو عاد اليوم إلى الأَرض لَلَقي على يد أَحبار المسيحية ويد السلطة الزمنية أَبشع مما لقيه من يد أَحبار اليهودية ويد السلطة الرومانية َ ميخائيل نعيمة” ― ميخائيل نعيمة, من وحي المسيح
- “Δε γίνεται να εμποδίσεις τη δημιουργία μαρτύρων. Το μόνο που μπορεί κανείς να κάνει είναι να κοιτάξει να περιορίσει τον αριθμό τους. Αν ήξερα κάποιους Χριστιανούς τον καιρό του Νέρωνα, θα προσπαθούσα να τους σώσω απ’ τα λιοντάρια, εξηγώντας τους πως είναι προτιμότερο να ζει κανείς με την πίστη του, παρά να πεθαίνει γι’ αυτήν.” ― Graham Greene, The Comedians
- “If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
- “Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
- “When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
- “Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole.”[Blog post of July 26, 2011]” ― Jim C. Hines
- “All great celebrations break away from the mundane.” ― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice
- “It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image.” ― Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems