The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
The Republicans hardly need a party and the cumbersome cadre of low-level officials that form one; they have a bankroll as large as the Pentagon's budget, dozens of fatted PACs, and the well-advertised support of the Christian deity.
"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.
I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.
I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.
Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?
Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.
God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?
When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.
My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.
No sign of purpose can be detected in any part of the vast universe disclosed by our most powerful telescopes.
Jerusalem has been - and for many, still is - a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith.
In Jerusalem, the various modes of worship essentially stood for the same cause but were equally hateful to one another. They never served as a unifying factor. Their adherents were equally manipulated by the clergies to regard the others as wicked infidels or idolaters. The centuries passed in constant pious agitation and in frequent religious wars.
Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical.
Other world? There is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.
That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.
To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.
The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: