Alexander Herzen Quotes

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.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.

For most people, the question why be good - as distinguished from merely law abiding - is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell.

Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

For half a century past, the African slave-trade began to awaken a spirit of remorse and sympathy in the breasts of men, and a conviction that the traffic was repugnant to the principles of Christian duty, and the maxims of justice and humanity

Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.

Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.

Most Muslims don't obey the order of god to kill infidels. This is why I say Muslims have more morality than their god.

I entirely appreciate loyalty to one"s friends, but loyalty to the cause of justice and honor stands above it.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

We need to believe I think in justice. We need to run our lives as if justice existed... If we abandon a belief that justice will eventually be done, we make this world much more difficult for ourselves.

Whenever the civil government forbids the practice of things that God has commanded us to do, or tells us to do things He has commanded us not to do, then we are on solid ground in disobeying the government and rebelling against it.

Tis certain that Morality is an indispensable Requisite of true Religion, and there can be none without it. But it would become the Pride and Ignorance of Pagans only, to magnify it, as the Whole of what is necessary.

Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.

For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.

Morality is either a social contract or you have to pay cash.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

My business is to obey when the Lord commands, and this is the duty of all mankind.

One is most dishonest to one's god: he is not allowed to sin.

Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative.

Ethics is inescapable.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.