“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”
“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
“The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.”
“Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance.”
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
“Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.”
“I do benefits for all religions -- I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.”
“Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens.”
“The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.”
“To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.”
“Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.”
“Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.”
“If religion is only human, and its form is man's form, it follows that everything in religion is true.”
“Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.”
“It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.”
“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.”
“A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.”
“There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.”
“The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”
“We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.”
“It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity.”
“I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.”
“Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.”
“When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.”
“A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.”
“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.”
“For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.”
“Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.”
“It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.”
“A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”