Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."
There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
Here the only genuine conflict is between true believers. Of a given text in Holy Writ one faction may say this thing and another that, but both agree unreservedly that the text itself is impeccable, and neither in the midst of the most violent disputation would venture to accuse the other of doubt. To call a man a doubter in these parts is equal to accusing him of cannibalism. Even the infidel Scopes himself is not charged with any such infamy.
Why do men go to zoos?
The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.
There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.
The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum - the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.
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