R Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with R. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”
“Religion grows with the intelligence of man, but all religions of the past and probably all of the future will sooner or later become petrified forms instead of living helps to mankind. Until that time comes, however, if religion of any name or nature makes man more happy, comfortable, and able to live peaceably with his brothers, it is good.”
“Religion guides about ethics and morality in all human endeavours including scientific endeavours. For instance, religion would not allow using technology to kill someone, harm others and destroy resources and environment. As a matter of fact, 200 million people died in 20th century wars alone, which is equal to all of human population on earth living at the time of Jesus (pbuh). WWF reports that humans have destroyed half of all animal life in the last 40 years alone. Humans just make up 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists had termed the current age ‘Anthropocene’ due to the unprecedented loss caused by human activities in the modern age. In this kind of involvement of religion in scientific endeavours, religious values play a positive role in emphasizing responsibility, care, preservation and cooperation.”
Source: Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World
“Religion has a fanaticism problem - center religion on metaphor, and problem solved. Science has a freezing problem - center science on service, and problem solved.”
Source: Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
“Religion has a good place and it has its good people.”
“Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.”
Source: Mathilda Savitch
“Religion has accepted and almost “Christianized” the machine, and it is dying from this, whether through absurdity and hypocrisy, as in the past, or through capitulation and suicide, as today. It is as if there were only two sins, unbelief and unchastity; the machine is neither an unbeliever nor is it unchaste; therefore one may sprinkle it with holy water in good conscience.”
Source: The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity
“Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.”
“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.”
“Religion has always been a matter of community building; a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion, fellow feeling and - I dare to use the word - inclusion, which would otherwise be absent from our societies.”
“Religion has always been an irrelevant aspect if my life. The people here are either pissed of atheists, or religious freaks waiting for God to save them.”
“Religion has always been the picklock of imperialism. Let them try to convert the heathens, and when they fail, we shall send in the French Navy to protect them and our political and commercial interests.”
“Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.”
Source: An interview with Dennis Potter: an edited transcript of Melvyn Bragg's interview with Dennis Potter, broadcast on the 5th of April 1994
“Religion has always persecuted science.”
Source: Angels & Demons - Movie Tie-In: A Novel
“Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.”
Source: Insecurity of Freedom
“Religion has become so many different things. Religion is an economic thing for some people. Religion is a gun.”
“Religion has become the blind spot of American journalism.”
“Religion has become to many merely a means of doing a little charity work, just to amuse them after a hard day's labour - they get five minutes religion to amuse them. This is the danger with the liberal thought.”
Source: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
“Religion has been a curse on the world and humanity will never know freedom until this curse has been exorcised. It is the curse of ignorance, which has cast its dark shadow over thousands of years of human suppression.”
“Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.”
“Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”
Source: God is Not Great
“Religion has been an essential part of my life ever since I was baptised. My personal journey with God has been very important throughout my life.”
“Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.”
“Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas. . . .”
Source: First Principles
“Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.”
“Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.”
“Religion... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever... If someone votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I must [not] move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'... Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.”
“Religion has colonized even the colonizers.”
“Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.”
“Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.”
“Religion has endured since the dawn of human consciousness precisely because it encompasses so much of being human. No idea has endured so long, gathered up so many disparate needs and wants and feelings, and inspired so many different paths towards understanding it.”
“Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over.”
“Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.”
“Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion, that we shall discover truth, morality and reason. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from these remedies which nature advocates, far from curing; it only aggravates, perpetuates and multiplies them.”
“Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.”
“Religion has failed us. Christ was not a Christian. Buddha was not a Buddhist. Mohammed was not a Mohammedan. And yet ever since the dawn of history, we have engaged in conflict and war and terrorism and murder and racism and ethnocentrism and bigotry and prejudice in the name of God.”
“Religion has gotten a bad rap for good reasons. Often, there are a lot of people - women, LBGT, and others - you know, hierarchical monotheism has been a real source of a type of oppression.”
“Religion has in fact outdone culture in dualistic thinking - we've become as violent, as hateful toward our enemies, damning them to hell and whatever else, that the world doesn't look to us for wisdom, because we're trapped in the dualistic mind, instead of the mind of Christ that we were supposed to have.”
“Religion has invented that wonderful thing called charity. It is the most vicious and vulgar thing that we have done. Nature has provided us with a bounty. But we are individually responsible for the inequities of the world.”
Source: Thought is Your Enemy: Mind-Shattering Conversations with the Man Called U.G.
“Religion has more reasons than solution. On the contrary i need more solutions than reasons.”
“Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.”
Source: Seventy years among savages
“Religion has never made me happy; it's no use shutting your eyes to the fact that the deeper you go, the more alone you will find yourself.”
“Religion has no business to formulate social laws and insist on the difference between beings, because its aim and end is to obliterate all such fictions and monstrosities.”
Source: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
“Religion has no power if God is not truly 'dangerous,' but religion also seeks to manage God, and make God safe.
The second commandment speaks against the management of God. We cannot help but make our images of God, for God has given us imagination. But every image we make of God is finally a box: a cage, potentially an idol, from which the living God keeps breaking out. And if we try to keep God there, then God comes out with 'jealousy' to overturn our careful construction.
The third commandment speaks against the management of God. To take God's name in vain is to make God useful to our projects and ourselves. We are wont to trivialize the truth of God and then disparage it for being trivial. We are told God's name in order to love this God, but loving God is not managing God but fearing [respecting] God. And with God, the attitudes of love and fear [respect] are not contradictory but complementary.”
“Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.”
Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
“Religion has nothing more to fear than not being sufficiently understood.”
Source: Moral reflections, sentences and maxims of Francis, duc de la Rochefoucauld
“Religion has nothing to do with compassion; it is our love for God that is the main thing because we have all been created for the sole purpose to love and be loved.”
“Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.”
“Religion has only one answer and that answer is meditation. And meditation means how to empty yourself.”