Aziz Ansari Quotes

Young people especially sometimes feel that the standards of the Lord are like fences and chains, blocking them from those activities that seem most enjoyable in life.

I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn't like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.

I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.

I had this moment in church, which I think really turned me off. I was 7 or 8 years old and I was sitting at church, and we happened to be playing with the sunlight that was coming down from the stained glass window, and the monsignor came down to the pew and grabbed us by our neck collars and said, 'I'll deal with you.'

My dad was a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, and from an early age I was put off by being force-fed a belief system.

The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been.

Everything that you know about yourself comes from thinking back, and I think I saw religion as the first big betrayal of me.

I hated school right away. Religion had a lot to do with it because I felt like everybody was always lying to me.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Do you think if it was the fairy tale about a man who lived inside of a whale and it was religion that Jack built a beanstalk today, you would know the difference? Why do you believe in one fairy tale and not the other? Just because adults told you it was true and they scared you into believing it, at pain of death, at pain of burning in hell.

The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.

I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.

It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.

In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?

You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you've got to go and who is the real turkey.

I used to be sceptic, but not anymore, because now I am positive that I'm getting screwed.

It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion [...]. If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?

No one has the right to tell me what to do because he has a divine warrant.

All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again.

The black people in this country are taught that their religion and the best religion is the religion of Islam, and when one accepts the religion of Islam, he's known as a Muslim.

I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.

Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!