Marquis de Sade Quotes

Avoiding the physical sciences due to the fear that they will lead to heresy is childish.

All the evils that men cause to each other because of certain desires, or opinions or religious principles, are rooted in ignorance. [All hatred would come to an end] when the earth was flooded with the knowledge of God.

Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are other than sick men's dreams.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

I'm not religious anymore, but I think it's like papal infallibility, which is a ridiculous man-made tenet, like what I believe most religious tenets to be, are man-made after the fact.

I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.

There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?

Ghosts were just a way that some stupid people dealt with their dull lives.

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that's the way I felt when I was young.

If a religious person says "No, no, no" and they won't listen to science, it makes me think that they don't have faith in their own religion.

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.

The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance.

... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.

This Nation was established by men who believed in God. ... You will see the evidence of this deep religious faith on every hand.

I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.

Don't be intimidated by what you don't know.

When an individual fear or apathy would cause us to pass by the unfortunate, then life is of no account.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

I am a Muslim, because it's a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance

I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny-fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.

There is nothing scary about life if you are not attached to results.

It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.