Bertrand Russell Quotes

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.

No religion can be built on force.

I regard irreligious people as pioneers. If there had been no priesthood the world would have advanced ten thousand times better than it has now.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in chains.

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.

I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.

I personally believe that our planet would be absolutely fine without religion, and I also feel we are evolving in that direction.

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.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals.

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.

However, we all share the firm belief in the triumph of humanist and progressive values that mankind has achieved during its long history of struggle and creativeness.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Your mom was right when she told you never to discuss politics and religion because emotions run so high in those arenas. Especially religion.

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

This is an exciting time. I believe we stand at the edge of a new age - a Golden Age - of freedom that will rival any of the great eras of world history because it will be the entire world itself that is changing.

Religion's war against fringe beliefs is not a contest of rational and irrational. It is a contest between different fantasy systems, one having more political and financial clout than the others and, therefore, able to advertise itself into respectability.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past

The fewer dogmas, the fewer disputes; the fewer disputes, the fewer miseries