Jena Malone Quotes

There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them.

Religion's war against fringe beliefs is not a contest of rational and irrational. It is a contest between different fantasy systems, one having more political and financial clout than the others and, therefore, able to advertise itself into respectability.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.

It takes an institution to help propagandize an idea.

Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.

What happens when we put belief in front of reason? When we even put belief above human life?

Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing?

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

Religion has played a big part in eliminating the nuance in humanity. People began to believe things before they knew them. It stopped people from listening and learning with the patience and love of the God they believe in.

Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy. It is happening today in the same way - more so, in fact - as it has throughout human history.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

I'm so incredibly tired of giving respect to a lot of delusions and crazy ideas just because they are regarded as religions.

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.