Home / Quotes / Quote by Leo Tolstoy

Quote by Leo Tolstoy

“One may say with one's lips: “I believe that the world was created six thousand years ago;” or, “I believe that Jesus flew away into the skies and is sitting on the right hand of the Father;” or, “God is One, and also Three;” — but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense.”

Quote by Leo Tolstoy

Author

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer and thinker, a prominent representative of 19th-century Russian literature. His works deeply revealed social contradictions and human nature, and had a profound impact on the world. more

You May Also Like

“It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one.”

Source: Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States

“According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two.”

Ifs Two Religion Three Left Equal Tables Add Absurd Heavenly Peculiar Dogma Three Times Celestial Trinity Idiotic Multiplication Subtraction

Author:Robert Green Ingersoll

“The harm that theology has done is not to create cruel impulses, but to give them the sanction of what professes to be lofty ethic, and to confer an apparently sacred character upon practices which have come down from more ignorant and barbarous times.”

Giving Done Character Religion Practice Ethics Sacred Harm Theology Ignorant Impulse Sanctions Lofty

Book:Religion and Science

Source: Religion and Science

“I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.”

Knows Lasts Form Religion Church Accepting Crime Denial Useless Pioneers

Book:The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

“The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say 'charge it.' 'Put it on the slate.' The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance.”

Ifs Way Christian Religion Pay Moral Crime Ancient Committed Jew Credit Savior Sheep Slate Extravagance

Author:Robert Green Ingersoll

“The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality.”

Ifs Humans Ideas Religion Wish Race Morality Rewards Miserable Human Race Subversive

Book:The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

“Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal.”

Religion Atheism Instance Brutal Dominant Stagnant

Author:George Agnew Reid

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion.”

Religion Belief Higher Disease Worship Adults Rate Creator Abortion Mortality Pregnancy Juvenile Homicide Teen Pregnancy

Author:Gregory S. Paul

“This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.”

Source: Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume

“Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.”

War Used Religion Three Religious Atheist Decades Radical Opponents Civil War Plot Emancipation Ethos Abolitionist

Book:Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Source: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism