Robert Owen Quotes

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.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

There are a lot of scientists or other people who can be very skeptical or rational within their field, but they may well not do that in other aspects of their lives, when it comes to things like religion, or what have you. People have this amazing gift for being selective with their curiosity and skepticism.

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.

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

Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.

People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things [witches and witchcraft] are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe.

Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses.

The longer you hold a belief, the less likely it is to be true.

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge; this, I take it, is the reason why Christians are distinguished from the rest of the world, not by faith, nor by charity, nor by the other fruits of the Holy Spirit, but solely by their opinions, inasmuch as they defend their cause, like everyone else, by miracles, that is by ignorance, which is the source of all malice; thus they turn a faith, which may be true, into superstition.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

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

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

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.

I have noticed that many who do not believe in God believe in everything else, even in the evil eye.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

There will always be those little minds who, out of vanity or intellectual display, will attempt to destroy faith in the very foundations of life.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe - you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.