R Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with R. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness.”
“Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”
“Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.”
“Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe for questioning. For without doubt there is no faith.”
“Religious beliefs are; in a way, a form of voluntary, self-induced psychosis. Which eliminates or softens the fall (if the real psychosis ever came). Medicine for the mind, or if you will - the soul.”
“Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honoured.”
“Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.”
“Religious beliefs influence how populations reproduce with one another and how many children they have; thus, religion has evolutionary consequences (in addition to its probable evolutionary origins).”
Source: Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
“Religious beliefs...should never be an excuse to treat people badly.”
“Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.”
Source: Vulgarians at the Gate: Trash TV and Raunch Radio : Raising the Standards of Popular Culture
“Religious bigotry is a dull fire - hot enough to roast an ox, but with no lambent, luminous flame shooting up from it.”
Source: Memoir and Letters
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
[Letter to William Bradford Jr. April 1 1774]”
Source: Letters and Other Writings of James Madison Volume 3
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.”
Source: Selected Writings of James Madison
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
“Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?”
Source: Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens: Two Classical Plays
“Religious celebrations, and the good will, high spirits and generosity that mark them, are wonderful occasions for understanding the potential of 'everyday multiculturalism', and how people from diverse faiths can connect and show they care, rather than go down parallel, sometimes hostile, roads.”
“Religious charity in exchange for religious conversion is the most sacrilegious act of all.”
Source: Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat
“Religious commandments make humans seem way less animal than they are.”
“Religious communities have historically been designed to counteract the forces of alienation. That's why so many successful social movements have relied upon the strength of spiritual communities and a large base of their organizing has been through them.”
“Religious concepts and vocabulary are certainly censored in these textbooks.”
“Religious concerns ok, if translated into universal values.”
“Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.”
“Religious conservatives still lack a theology of direct political action.”
“Religious contention is the devil's harvest.”
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.”
Source: The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, 1745-1799
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause: And I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of ⟨the present⟩ age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this Kind.”
“Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.”
“Religious Cult: The church down the street from yours.”
“Religious devotion is for the individual. Character is for all. There is no loss if there is no devotion. Everything is lost if there is no character.”
“Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction.”
“Religious discrimination is not like racial discrimination. One you chose for yourself, the other God chose for you.”
“Religious distinctions are deeply important for many of the problems in today's Middle East, particularly between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq.”
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of the real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of the spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people.”
Source: Collected Works
“Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.”
Source: Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
“Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”
Source: THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
“Religious dogma creates a perfect fertilizer for the weeds of hypocrisy.”
Source: Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
“Religious dogma not only results in the form of gross, zealous behavior such as the killing of ethnic minorities as part of a cultural cleansing, it is substantiated by warped statements of certainties that corrupt the mind and make you a slave to further the agenda the organization that initiated it.”
“Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.”
“Religious education is only valuable intellectually, if the child is educated in a religion versus [just] about a religion. I don't believe you can have both.”
“Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.”
Source: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
“Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.”
“Religious expression must at least be afforded an equal playing field. Currently, the playing field is not level. Religious expression and practices are treated as second class forms of speech and singled out for discrimination.”
“Religious externals may have meaning for the God-inhabited soul; for any others they are not only useless but may actually become snares, deceiving them into a false and perilous sense of security.”
“Religious extremism is fatal to those who don't conform to its values, or remold or submit themselves to its 'principles'. It craves control and power - and power is the one tool that enables it to wreak its characteristic havoc, destruction and cruelty upon those it chooses to label as scapegoats. Giving in to extremists enables them and empowers them - and worse, it encourages them.”
“Religious extremists want to show us that the only possibility is for us to kill each other, so September 11 is not only heinous murder, it is also global performance. It is also putting an idea into the world, an idea of destruction.”
“Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.”
“Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.”
“Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be surprising to religious believers in the West, but it is an integral part of Vedantic belief.”
“Religious faith is an important aspect of American culture and a fact of American political life.”
Source: Collected Papers