Emile Durkheim Quotes

Religion is one dimension of culture, a transcendent element of it.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

On a personal note, myself, I find religion - I can understand it, I can understand why we have it, as a kind of force on the planet. And I also at the same time think it's ludicrous.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

Religion is all bunk.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

Religion has nothing to do with spirituality.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

I hold that religion and faith are two different things.

I believe religion is man-made.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

From a young kid, I was quite interested in religion.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion.

Religion is an irrational construct.

I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

There's nothing funnier than religion. Try explaining it to a kid. I had it all wrong when I was a kid.

Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.