Organized Religion Quotes

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.”
― John Lennon

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“I'm completely in favor of the
separation of Church and State.
... These two institutions screw us up enough
on their own, so both of them together is
certain death.”
― George Carlin

“Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
― Seneca

“If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.”
― Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters

“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”
― George Carlin

“I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate.”
― George Carlin

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”
― Émile Zola

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“...legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”
― Edmond de Goncourt

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
― Richard Dawkins

“God save us from religion.”
― David Eddings

“Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Your way of life is sinful and wrong," he said fiercely.
Thus says a man who admits to worshipping a God who vilifies pleasure, relegates women to roles that are little more than servants and broodmares, though they are the backbone of your church, and seeks to control his worshippers through guilt and fear.”
― P.C. Cast, Betrayed

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
― Lenny Bruce

“Theology is ignorance with wings.”
― Sam Harris

“The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!”
― Harvey Milk

“The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.'

'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”
― Carl Sagan