If you really want to make a million ... the quickest way is to start your own religion. Author unknown, previously attributed to L Ron Hubbard
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, the spirit of the spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx
Certainly the religious overlay of patriotism has come into fashion. It’s always there of course. Arthur Miller
‘Peace upon Earth!’ was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas. Thomas Hardy, Christmas
Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) and just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared. Isaac Newton, manuscript ‘A Short Schem of the True Religion’
That first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. Isaac Newton, On the Origin of Religion and its Corruption c.1690
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. William Ralph Inge
Religion is an all-important matter in a public school for girls. Whatever people say, it is the mother’s safeguard, and the husband’s. What we ask of education is not that girls should think, but that they should behave. Napoleon Bonaparte
Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same. Napoleon Bonaparte
If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god. Napoleon Bonaparte
How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares ‘God wills it thus’. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Napoleon Bonaparte
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. Napoleon Bonaparte, attributions & variations
Religion is a common notion. For there has never been a century nor any nation without religion. Lord Herbert of Cherbury
All religions have this in common: that they are an outrage to common sense for they are pieced together out of a variety of elements. Pierre Charron
I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion. John Buchanan
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, since Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum. Havelock Ellis
When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion but the Church of England. Henry Fielding 1707-54, Tom Jones
Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, – always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions which have got the better of him. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody’s torments in this world or the next laid to my charge. Lord Chesterfield, 1694-1773
Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company. Lord Chesterfield
The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution. Max Weber
I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose. Clarence Darrow
Fires have been lighted in America to kindle religious bigotry and hate. Clarence Darrow
Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion. Thomas Browne
Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion. Thomas Browne
If there by any among those common objects of hatred I do condemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason – virtue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra. Thomas Browne, Religio Meidici, 1643
Robert Burton, 1577-1640, The Anatomy of Melancholy
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. H L Mencken, US editor, 1880-1956
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing. H L Mencken
People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police. H L Mencken
By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? ... Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil. H L Mencken, The American Mercury February 1926
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly. H L Mencken
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. H L Mencken
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. H L Mencken
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God. H L Mencken, Minority Report
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. Edward Gibbon, 1737-94, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire