Anne Rice Quotes

Religion has caused more misery to all men in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

Humanity is the sin of God.

No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

In the struggle of good against evil, it's always the people who get killed.

The world is full of religion, and full of misery and crime.

To justify God's ways to man.

I cannot be a materialist - but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery - such suffering, such dreadful suffering - and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

It is precisely that requirement of shared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another. They have invented gods and challenged each other: "Discard your gods and worship mine or I will destroy both your gods and you!"

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

The first kind of evil is that which is caused to man by the circumstance that he is subject to genesis and destruction, or that he possesses a body.

When ideas become gods, consciousness of harmony becomes devotion, humility, and hope.

For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.

For now indeed is the race of iron; and men never cease from labour and sorrow by day and from perishing by night.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.

We now come to the grand law of the system in which we are placed, as it has been developed by the experience of our race, and that, in one word, is SACRIFICE!

The Cross of Christ may have overcome evil, but it did not overcome unfairness. For that, Easter is required.