Octavia E. Butler Quotes

religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.

The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, andobedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives.

Some people say that without God, people would give themselves permission to do anything. [Yet] only with God, only with the view that God's on your side, can people give themselves permission to do things that otherwise would be called satanic.

Those Catholics, they really nab you when you're young.

Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.

I think you can judge from somebody's actions a kind of a stability and sense of purpose perhaps created by strong religious roots. I mean, there's a certain patience, a certain discipline, I think, that religion helps you achieve.

A strong case can be made for religious leaders to speak out on political issues.

The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.

No, we are not the master of the state, said King. We are not the servant of the state. We are the conscience of the state. The churches or the religious community should be, I think, the conscience of the state. We're not just service providers.

The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

The world looks at preachers out of church to know what they mean in it.

The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truth by which men are to be guided in government as well as in all social transactions.

Major religions usually remain major because they sanctify whatever is the social stricture of the day.

The religious people in Saudi Arabia are very powerful and don't allow anyone to step on their toes.

Priesthoods were invented in order to provide the commoners and slaves with a theory of the world, so that they could accept society as it was. This theory explained that social inequalities were intrinsically good and necessary.

If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit..

This is my compass, my North Star, it gives me comfort and guidance to do what’s best for Arkansas. The Bible is not a rule book for political issues … everybody can see it differently

There's nothing wrong in men of God going into politics. It will help them to do what is right.

This gives the agents of the gods a powerful area of support. All they need to do is to remind their followers constantly of their mortality and to convince them that the afterlife itself is under the personal management of the particular gods they are promoting. The self-protective urges of their worshippers will do the rest.

The preachers are the greatest problem in the United States of America.

I always think about what would Christ do in any circumstances.

The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.

For some reason, which I believe I can guess, the churches/mosques want control of people when or while they are the most vulnerable or suggestible. If they can't get them in school, then they get them when they are hungry, or frightened, or ill, or homeless, or unemployed. Same difference. Here's your gruel, and here's a tract.