“Avoid those who seek friends in order to maintain a certain social status or to open doors they would not otherwise be able to approach.”

“Every generation gets stuck in own youth and then scolds succeeding generations for sticking in their youth.”

“Hypocrisy is something I have learned saturates every level of our society. I see it more with my old age than I did then. At some stage I started questioning everything that I was being taught and turned against various aspects of my upbringing. Maybe I had my reasons and maybe I needed new ways to cope.”

“To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end to itself, to approach Bible study with no higher motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied deception.”

“Your religion…serves you only for an excuse for your faults, but is no incentive to your virtue.”

“To me, my husband was my son’s murderer. He was also my daughter’s molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin every night. He was Bhai’s destroyer, Amma Sain’s tormentor, Ma’s humbler and the people’s exploiter. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed on the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us.”

“These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.”

“We call talking about other people’s personal lives ‘gossip’ only if we aren’t or weren’t part of the conversation.”

“I played my role as the good Christian girl and spared everyone the drama of an argument. But that decision to remain silent split me in two. It convinced me that I could never really be myself in church. That I had to check my heart and mind at the door.”

“The fury of confession, at first,then the fury of clarity:It was from you, Death, that such hypocriticalobscure feeling was born! And nowlet them accuse me of every passion,let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed,impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer.You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life,I’m on the stake. I play the card of fireand I win this little, immense goodness of mine.I can do it, for I have suffered you too much!I return to you as an émigré returnsto his own country and rediscovers it:I made a fortune (in the intellect)and I’m happy, as I once was,destitute of any norm,a black rage of poetry in my breast.A crazy old-age youth.Once your joy was confused with terror,it’s true, and now almost with other joy,livid and arid, my passion deluded.Now you really frighten me,for you are truly close to me,part of my angry state, of obscure hunger,of the anxiety almost of a new being.”

“He who does not believe and yet follows the ritualsteaches his children to be hypocrits(From: Kinderpraat)”

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best — making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred — secret hatred: there is disgust — unspoken disgust: there is treachery — family treachery: there is vice — deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies … All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”

“To be honest, one can only feel glad that so many modern iconoclasts consider Christianity to be full of exceptionally hypocritical, religious zealots – it’s biblically accurate and a prophecy fulfilled. The old smoke screen is one of Satan’s favorite tricks. He conceals the authentic. He has a persistent strategy of targeting those who remind him of Christianity because he fears those who remind him of Christ.”

“The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher’s knife.”

“He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.”