W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.

There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word 'homosexual.'

'Secularism' is the most misused word in the country. Its misuse should come to an end.

The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

If you actually read the Bible, you can see there's a whole lot more information in there than the way we interpret the Bible. Because there are single lines in the Bible where if you just take them at face-value, they don't make any sense whatsoever in the world we see, we know, and we understand.

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend - just as if it were a novel - very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly.

About the injunction of the Apostle Paul that women should keep silent in church? Don't go by one text only.

My knowledge of the letter of the Shastras is better, but of true religion they are able to give me but little.

No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so profoundly meditated upon as the Bible.

When I was a teenager, I read the bible cover-to-cover, and I found the Old Testament, it's a pretty bloody history book.

When I'm 18 years old, I'm at a friend's house. And his uncle looks me in me eye - you know, by this time I'm an over achiever, a pretty good student, etc. And he said I have the answer to your problems. I have the solution to your pain. And he held up this book. It's a bible. I didn't know what it was.

...It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.

How do I know the Bible isn't the word of God? Well if it was the word of God it would be clear and easy to understand...considering God was the creator of LANGUAGE!

What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. Are, not were.

An error becomes an error when born as truth.

The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much, but on the contrary made me incline somewhat towards atheism.

The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.

It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.

One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable.

Those who are lacking in bhakti (devotion), lacking in faith, are ill qualified to interpret the scriptures.