All Quotes By Tag: Religion

“I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested–‘But these impulses may be from below, not from above.’ I replied, ‘They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil’s child, I will live them from the devil.”

“A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it’s the same wind that blows them.”

“With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.”

“All have the ability to perceive and live in dimensional synthesis, yet they spend time with the sciences trying to separate these realms, splitting the worlds into minutia, seeking the god particle. They are searching high and low, ‘out there’, for the source of it all, but no matter how many accelerators they build, no matter how far they go, they will never find the source ‘out there’ because the source is within”

“Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there’s no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it’s an artefact from times long gone.”

“Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they’d seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it’s nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, “Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!” or “Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!”

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew–or a Quaker–or a Unitarian–or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you–until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end–where all men and all churches are treated as equal–where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice–where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind–and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe–a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office….This is the kind of America I believe in–and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a “divided loyalty,” that we did “not believe in liberty,” or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the “freedoms for which our forefathers died.”

“There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.”

“A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it’s a rival religion.”

“Beyond Islam and unbelief there is a desert plain. For us, there is a passion in the midst of that expanse. The knower who reaches there will prostrate, there is neither Islam nor unbelief, nor any ‘where’ in that place.”

“All right, so you believe in Santa Claus, and I’ll believe in the ‘Great Pumpkin.’ The way I see it, it doesn’t matter what you believe just so you’re sincere! (Linus)”

“بعض أسباب رسوخ و حصانة السلبية تعود إلى ارتكازها على مفاهيم تنسب زورا و ظلما إلى الدين أو إلى نصوص دينية مجتزأة من سياقها أو إلى مواقف لعلماء دين كانت مجرد ردود أفعال في سياقها التاريخي و هكذا فإن ذلك كله يتداخل مع أمثال شعبية و أقوال مأثورة و أنماط سلوك شائعة قديمة تجعل كل ما سبق يمتلك حصانة و قداسة لا مبرر لها دينيا بل و كل ما في الإسلام هو ضد هذه السلبية .”

“لقد جاء القرآن بدين الفطرة ليحرر بأوامره القدسية النفوس المغلولة، وينجي من معاشر الجهالة العقول الضالة”

“لقد فرض الإسلام ،منذ أشرق نور القرآن على القلوب، وتجلت تعاليمه الفطرية على العالم الإنساني، التفكير وقبح التقليد ورفع الحجر عن العقول”

“We could all use the power of prayer now and then, but it seems to me that the people who are sure they have a direct line to heaven are most often calling collect with bad news.”