Bill Maher Quotes

Concerning First Amendment fetishism - A federal subsidy for a photo of a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine is fine, but religious figures on stamps are offensive.

I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

A lotta Christians wear crosses 'round their necks; do you think if Jesus comes back he ever wants to see another cross?

As Buddhists, statues are more than simply pieces of stone to us. We believe the statue of the Buddha has a kind of soul and is the Buddha in some sense. This is why we can pray to it. Clay is a very interesting and fundamental material - it's earth, it's water and - with fire - it takes on form and life. In fact, what is art? Art is giving to what you create a soul. That's why it is said God is like an artist.

It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

Every artist paints his Madonna according to his own pre-conceived ideas.

Nor will I be using any imagery that mocks Jesus Christ.

My new tattoo is Jesus being carried by three cherubs. Obviously the cherubs are my boys. At some point they are going to need to look after me. That's what they're doing in the picture. It means a lot.

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them.

Beijing is constructing a 100,000 m2 modern art museum, yet it will not feature any of my work.

You think when Jesus comes back, he really wants to see a cross? That's like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on.

When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.