religion
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘religion’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Although religion was around me my whole life I never felt it was forced upon me. It is my centring, my grounding, the soul of me. I feel I’m nothing without it.” -Nicole Scherzinger
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“Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.” -Lance Loud
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“I should like to repeat what I stated recently in the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia: It won’t be the religion, but rather the world-view of some of its followers that shall be made current.” -Recep Tayyip Erdogan
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“Both of my parents would say they were atheists, so where I inherited my connection to God I don’t know. But it’s natural. No Bible, no Torah, just the love religion.” -Lisa Bonet
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“Things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade private life.” -Lord Melbourne
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“I think there’s a difference between God and religion.” -Sinead O’Connor
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“I believe that the Framers of the Constitution made their intent clear when they wrote the First Amendment. I believe they wanted to keep the new government from endorsing one religion over another, not erase the public consciousness or common faith.” -Nick Rahall
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“If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.” -Martin Amis
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“And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud’s view of man.” -Chaim Potok
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“Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles.” -Lafcadio Hearn
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“Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.” -Studs Terkel
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“To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was.” -Reese Witherspoon
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“Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils.” -Arthur Wellesley
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“I’m interested in spirituality and in religion and our relationship to the divine.” -Giancarlo Esposito
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“I found enormous opposition to my religion. It’s like if you want to strengthen your biceps, you lift heavy weight, as heavy as you can handle, and work your muscles against resistance until it grows strong. I had to do that with my religion.” -Ricardo Montalban
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“Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who’s going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it’s more powerful than religion. So it’s going to have to be the vigilante consumer.” -Anita Roddick
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“All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what’s inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn’t be able to tell from those X-rays what the…
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“If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were.” -Denise Mina
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“Where you have no religion, you are sure to have no government, for as religion disappears, anarchy takes place and fixes a compleat Hell on earth till religion returns.” -Daniel Morgan
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“Kinsey was trying to study sex scientifically, get rid of the overlay of culture and religion.” -Bill Condon
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“With religion I was always like, ‘Does it matter if it’s true if it makes you happy?’” -Matt Stone
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“It’s fun being in Islamic countries, to know there’s only one religion. There’s order. You wear a burqa. There’s no choice. People are happy with that.” -Prince
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“There can be no truce between science and religion.” -John B. S. Haldane
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“It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on.” -Mary Douglas
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“You can’t write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I’m very interested in what religion does to us – its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.” -Geraldine Brooks
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“Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ’s religion illuminates with His divine light.” -Franz Liszt
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“Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.” -Wendell Phillips
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“It doesn’t matter what color, sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc., everyone should have the same freedoms and liberties.” -Lance Bass
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“I am a Westerner. We’re not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us, but essentially it’s like a mirror, saying, hey, can’t you see what’s here in your own religion, what are you, stupid?” -Matthew Fox
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“Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. It’s not something that any culture, religion or tradition propagates.” -Michelle Bachelet
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“How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?” -Andrew Sullivan
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“Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it, so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion.” -Thomas More
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“I like to say magic is the world’s second oldest profession, a mystical and often awe-inspiring spectacle that, throughout the ages, has blended superstition, trickery and religion.” -Criss Angel
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“I took religion much too seriously, however, and its overall effect was depressing. I would have really liked to discard it, but somehow I couldn’t.” -Jack Dee
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“I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.” -Gael Garcia Bernal
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“In every society in human history, including the United States, those in power seek to imbue themselves with the attributes of religion and patriotism as a way of getting greater support for their policy and insulating themselves from any criticism.” -George J. Mitchell
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“One of Dawkins’ major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.” -Ray Comfort
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“Our religion does not discriminate according to color, sex or anything else. What counts is piety and faith.” -King Hussein I
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“Through history, people look for something spiritual. The greatest scientists in the world were men of religion and faith, too.” -Kirstie Alley
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“People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.” -Charles de Secondat
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“It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.” -Huston Smith
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“The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.” -Tom Wolfe
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“I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion, and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people.” -Peter Jennings
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“There’s a couple things you don’t talk about in life, and that’s race, religion and politics. I try to make sure I don’t talk about politics at all.” -Robert Griffin III
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“Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.” -Al Goldstein
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“Most modern science fiction went to school on ‘Dune.’ Even ‘Harry Potter’ with its ‘boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny’ shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.” -Gary Ross
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“I’m not a religious person, and I’m not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.” -Ian MacKaye
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“There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.” -Polly Toynbee
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“There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don’t think my generation wants that. That’s how it used to be.” -ASAP Rocky
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“No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.” -Walter Pater
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“The enemies of the Christian religion and the Law of God confuse law with faith.” -Randall Terry
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“We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave society devoid of belief.” -Jeff Miller
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“Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.” -Frank Herbert
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“The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.” -Arnold J. Toynbee
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“Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.” -Edward Bond
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“Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.” -Vaclav Klaus
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“Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.” -George Byron
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“It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.” -Ernestine Rose
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“Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.” -Hannah More
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“Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.” -Ralph W. Sockman
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“Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there.” -Mohammed Naguib
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“Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion.” -Sri Chinmoy
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“I know one thing: There are a billion Islamic people in the world today, and there will be about 2 billion by the time we’re dead. They’re not going to give up their religion.” -Chris Matthews
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“Religion is all-too-often a refuge for scoundrels.” -Neal Boortz
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“Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion.” -John Comenius
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“I’m a believer. I don’t go to church. I don’t belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn’t write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.” -Nick Cave
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“These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.” -Joan D. Vinge
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“Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar
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“Religion can be both good and bad – it is spirituality that counts.” -Pat Buckley
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“We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure.” -Shirin Ebadi
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“Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That’s a unique claim in the literature of religion.” -Josh McDowell
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“I do explicitly see Jewish people as a people – not either a religion or an ethnicity but a people.” -Kenneth Robert Livingstone
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“Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.” -Richard John Neuhaus
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“It’s a bit odd that nobody seems to be using the correct technical term to describe organized Islamic terrorists. They are not a faction of a religion or a social movement. They are a cult. A suicide cult.” -Craig Bruce
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“I never close a door on any other religion. Most of the time, some part of it makes sense to me. I don’t believe everyone has to chant just because I chant. I believe all religion is about touching something inside of yourself.” -Tina Turner
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“Certain I am, that Christian Religion does no where allow Rebellion.” -Mary Astell
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“I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life.” -Pete Seeger
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“Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion.” -Ruth St. Denis
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“Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.” -George Will
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“Diversity of thought and culture and religion and ideas has been the strength of America.” -Gary Locke
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“Religion is not a burden, not a weight, it is wings.” -Harry Emerson Fosdick
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“Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn’t manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.” -Jeane Kirkpatrick
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“I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.” -Herbert Read
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“Today’s interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.” -Naguib Mahfouz
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“Religion is induced insanity.” -Madalyn Murray O’Hair
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“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.” -Walter Savage Landor
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“If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.” -Tom Brokaw
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“My religion centers in different areas than what’s considered conventional religion.” -Jack Kevorkian
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“It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them.” -H. P. Blavatsky
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“My sense of religion is Einstein’s sense of relativity. I don’t believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.” -Mandy Patinkin
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“No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.” -Jeremy Bentham
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“Religion, like water, may be free, but when they pipe it to you, you’ve got to help pay for piping. And the Piper!” -Abigail Van Buren
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“Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion.” -Ville Valo
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“I don’t believe there’s any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.” -Ian Mcewan
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“What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!” -Sydney Smith
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“Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.” -Henri Bergson
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“My philosophy is that the most important aspect of any religion should be human kindness. And to try to ease the suffering of others. To try to bring light and love into the lives of mankind.” -Steven Seagal
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“I went to Catholic high school for half a year and religion wasn’t the cool thing to talk about even at a catholic high school. It never came up.” -Mandy Moore
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“Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.” -David Eagleman
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“I never found much comfort in overly organized religion of any sort.” -Jewel
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“We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.” -Serj Tankian
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“My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.” -Lionel Blue
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“So much about religion has to do with rigid, sacrosanct preciousness. I don’t live my life that way, and I don’t feel that’s what Baha’u’llah teaches.” -Rainn Wilson
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“Religion’s in the heart, not in the knees.” -Douglas William Jerrold
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“Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.” -Anita Brookner
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“Freedom of religion is a principle that is central to our Nation’s Declaration of Independence. Congress has taken this positive step to protect our freedom to express allegiance to America’s flag and the ideals it represents.” -Ron Lewis
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“It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion.” -Paul Nurse
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“I believe that there is some spiritual entity that’s greater than us. I do not belong to any specific organized religion. I have always believed that, and I believe it even more so now. I believe that someone was listening to me, and someone is giving me an incredibly blessed life.” -Jane Seymour
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“The American way was for commerce, personal relationships, and religion to be voluntary. No one was forced to participate in something he didn’t want.” -Harry Browne
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“The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.” -Ben Kingsley
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“Religion has become so many different things. Religion is an economic thing for some people. Religion is a gun.” -Ziggy Marley
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“I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.” -Luke Ford
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“For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.” -John C. Ransom
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“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” -Jerry Falwell
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“I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.” -Oriana Fallaci
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“Religion is the solid basis of good morals therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man toward God.” -Gouverneur Morris
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“I am not going to condemn anybody. That’s where religion gets a bad name, when people get holier than thou. We are all human. If my children make a mistake, I want them to know it is all right and they should try harder next time.” -Donny Osmond
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“The United States is not a nation based upon race, creed, or religion – we are a nation based upon our loyalty and allegiance to our country and her principles.” -Jim Ryun
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“Christianity is not about religion. It’s about faith, about being held, about being forgiven. It’s about finding joy and finding home.” -Bear Grylls
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“We live in a great country. It’s time again to get religion about it.” -Eric Liu
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“Even though you can’t expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That’s morality, that’s religion. That’s art. That’s life.” -Phil Ochs
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“Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand.” -Friedrich Durrenmatt
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“Religion is never the problem it’s the people who use it to gain power.” -Julian Casablancas
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“People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you’re lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.” -Carrie-Anne Moss
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“When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.” -Karen Armstrong
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“Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.” -Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.” -Tahar Ben Jelloun
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“Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call ‘lightly religious.’ So I don’t buy the notion that we can’t laugh about religion in America.” -Trey Parker
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“I love it when the left and when the president say, ‘Don’t try to impose your values on us, you folks who hold your Bibles in your hand and cling to your guns.’ They have values too. Our values are based on religion, based on life. Their values are based on a religion of self.”…
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“Communism was meant to be an alternative religion.” -David Miliband
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“In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.” -Jane…
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“I’m just confused as to where we lost that in America because it is everyone’s God-given right to think the way they think and that’s fine. That’s why our ancestors came here to America, to believe what they want, pray how they want and follow a religion with whoever they want.” -Angie Harmon
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“I did an album a long time ago called ‘Replicas,’ which was entirely science-fiction driven, or science-fantasy. Since then it’s been a song here, a song there. It’s not really a constant theme. I’ve written far more about my problems with religion, with God and all that.” -Gary Numan
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“Human nature doesn’t include all human beings. There are human beings who are indifferent to politics, religion, virtually anything.” -Conor Cruise O’Brien
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“The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.” -Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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“When asked if I consider myself Buddhist, the answer is, Not really. But it’s more my religion than any other because I was brought up with it in an intellectual and spiritual environment. I don’t practice or preach it, however.” -Uma Thurman
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“Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.” -Hu Shih
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“I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off ‘Thought for the Day’ when it comes on the radio.” -A. N. Wilson
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“We’re all sick of holy wars and bloodshed because religion is supposed to give us life and a better life and is supposed to bring out our best self. When it results in mass destruction and hatred and anxiety, it’s the antithesis I think of what religion was designed to do.” -Vera Farmiga
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“As long as there are religions, there are going to be people who are hiding their rottenness behind the veil of religion.” -Juliana Hatfield
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“I think we have to believe in things we don’t see. That’s really important for all of us, whether it’s your religion or Santa Claus, or whatever. That’s pretty much what it’s about.” -James Caan
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“People still kill in the name of religion. We haven’t evolved to the point where we’re one tribe called humans.” -Rachel Weisz
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“Twenty five percent of Israeli citizens are not even Jewish. Anybody can become an Israeli citizen if you qualify. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship.” -Alan Dershowitz
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“Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.” -Wallace Stevens
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“Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers.” -Zbigniew Brzezinski
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“I grew up very religious, and I don’t have a great relationship with religion.” -Brad Pitt
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“Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.” -Frederick Buechner
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“There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.” -Sean O’Casey
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“I think I like big issues, but I don’t believe in God or religion.” -Damien Hirst
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“Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God.” -Cyril Cusack
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“Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It’s a painful religion. We’re all gluttons for punishment.” -Madonna Ciccone
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“The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, THAT my friends, is true perversion.” -Harvey Milk
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“Yoga is not a religion to me.” -Christy Turlington
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“I know it’s very idealistic and utopian, but I believe we need to just let everyone not be judged in terms of religion, groups or nations or region.” -Shahrukh Khan
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“Religious tolerance is something we should all practice however, there have been more persecution and atrocities committed in the name of religion and religious freedom than anything else.” -Walter Koenig
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“The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn’t pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to.” -Ken Kesey
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“I firmly believe that the mission of religion in the 21st century must be to contribute concretely to the peaceful coexistence of humankind.” -Daisaku Ikeda
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“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.” -Gregory Bateson
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“In the 21st century, I believe the mission of the United Nations will be defined by a new, more profound awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, regardless of race or religion.” -Kofi Annan
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“There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.” -Eugene Ionesco
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“It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it’s in the Bush Administration.” -Roger Ebert
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“You’re always going to have extremists in every religion.” -King Abdullah II
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“The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires – and gives rise to – deep feelings of faith.” -Jeffrey Kluger
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“There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.” -Harriet Ann Jacobs
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“Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.” -Ezra Pound
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“I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.” -Joyce Carol Oates
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“I think people’s perception of a rich girl is literal, but metaphorically I embrace it as being rich in love, spirit, joy and religion. So it’s not about money.” -Angie Stone
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“There was no religion in my life growing up. Did God invent us or did we invent God?” -Eddie Izzard
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“Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.” -Heinrich Heine
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“Some people are that – more than a parent, more than a role model, more than anything less than a religion.” -Margaret Cho
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“Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil’s propagation.” -Hosea Ballou
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“Selfishness is the only real atheism unselfishness the only real religion.” -Israel Zangwill
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“In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude, helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.” -Jonathan Sacks
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“Religion brings to man an inner strength, spiritual light, and ineffable peace.” -Alexis Carrel
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