Norman Mailer Quotes

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

Liberty's chief foe is theology.

Turn a Christian society into an established church and it is no longer a voluntary assembly for the worship of God; it is a powerful corporation full of such sentiments and passions as usually distinguish these bodies: a dread of innovation, an attachment to abuses, a propensity to tyranny and oppression.

I hate censorship, man. I really do.

In Iran, there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary, no free elections. There is no freedom of religion - not even for Shiites, who are forced by Iran's theocracy to adhere to one narrow set of official rules.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.

In times of impending calamity and distress; when the liberties of America are imminently endangered by the secret machinations and open assaults of an insidious and vindictive administration, it becomes the indispensable duty of these hitherto free and happy colonies, with true penitence of heart, and the most reverent devotion, publickly to acknowledge the over ruling providence of God; to confess and deplore our offences against him; and to supplicate his interposition for averting the threatened danger, and prospering our strenuous efforts in the cause of freedom, virtue, and posterity.

Rather than being any longer a threat to the established … order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.

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

Zealous groups threaten to infringe civil liberties when they seek government support to impose their own religious views on non-adherents. This has taken many forms, including attempts to introduce organized prayer in public schools, to outlaw birth control and abortion, and to use public tax revenues to finance religious schools.

The oppression of thought and faith, the deprivation of true freedom both in faith and life - all things upon which the pope has placed his heavy hand; from hence come the false dogmas

It was not, as I have said, that we attacked religious fundamentalists, but that they felt themselves obliged to attack us. For the attempt to lead the moral life, or even to try to lead a better moral life, without first accepting religious dogmas was to their way of thinking monstrous.

Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity—such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship.

… male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

It is pretty safe to assume that any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.

The struggle for religion will be a struggle beside which the struggle for freedom will seem a little thing

If my ancestors had been Muslims in a country conquered by Christian armies, instead of Christians in a country conquered by the forces of Islam, I do not think that they would have allowed to live in their towns and villages, retaining their own religion, for over a thousand years.