Euripides Quotes

Any simple claim that you need religion to be good is flat wrong.

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

If God is incomprehensible to man, it would seem rational never to think of Him at all …. whether there exists a God or not ... men's moral duties will always be the same so long as they possess their own nature

We know that men and women can be good without faith. We know that.

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

Evil is not interesting. What is it, chopping off someone's head? We used to do that as kids, you know, you tear up paper dolls and stuff. I know everyone's done it in the history of the world, but maybe everybody was dumb and they were just looking for something interesting to do. What's really interesting and hard is being good.

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.

Badness is only spoiled goodness.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.

All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.

If a man sets his heart on benevolence he will be free from evil.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

The best religion the world has ever known is the religion of the Bible. It builds up all that is good.

Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.

I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind.

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about.

Goodness is equally hateful to the wicked, as vice is to the virtuous.

They don't subscribe to our sense of morality; they don't believe in an afterlife; they don't believe in a God or religion. And the only morality they recognize, therefore, is what will advance the cause or socialism.

My idea of what God should be is a good guy. I don't think there's any good in killing people in the name of your God.

He wasn't evil as much as magnificently innocent of any kind of morality.

Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.

If virtue were its own reward, it would no longer be a human quality, but supernatural.