Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.
~ Louis Aragon

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
~ Matthew Arnold

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
~ Mikhail Bakunin

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
~ Ambrose Bierce

And lips say ''God be pitiful,'' who never said, ''God be praised.''
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.
~ Edmund Burke

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day...
~ Lord Byron

If religion is only human, and its form is man's form, it follows that everything in religion is true.
~ Emile-Auguste Chartier

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.
~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; -- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Religion! what treasure untold resides in that heavenly word!
~ William Cowper

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.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
~ Albert Einstein

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
~ Ludwig Feuerbach

Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
~ Sigmund Freud

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
~ Northrop Frye

Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he ''lives'' his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.
~ George Gurdjieff

Religion I have disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give to them, and that is the Christian religion. If they had that and I had not given them one cent, they would be rich. If they have not that, and I had given them the world, they would be poor.
~ Patrick Henry

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former -- of the corruption of the will.
~ Alexander Herzen