Mary McCarthy Quotes

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

It is not the Bible that produced religion and morals, but religion and morals that produced the Bible.

Christian ethics are seldom found save in the philosophy of some unbeliever.

If you impose morality on people, they will find ways to circumvent their guilt. They will make offerings to temples - or other places of worship - but also continue doing things that make them feel guilty.

Those who are ashamed of what they ought not to be ashamed; and are not ashamed of what they ought to be - such men, embracing erroneous views, enter the woeful path.

You know, the one with all the well meaning rules that don't work out in real life, uh, Christianity.

If I should ever decide in the future to discuss my deep Christian beliefs and condemnation and sinfulness, I would use another forum besides Playboy.

All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.

In fact, because people are religious, they think they can do bad things.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

It deeply concerns me that somebody who knows little or nothing about the Christian faith would hear Mr. Trump call himself a Christian and then make a decision based on the Christian faith, based on his behavior.

It is a sin to be a mocker.

Morality binds and blinds.

The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.

No man is a Christian who cheats his fellows, perverts the truth, or speaks of a "clean bomb" yet he will be the first to make public his faith in God.

My religion teaches me that I should, by my personal conduct, instill into the minds of those who might hold different views the conviction that cow killing is a sin.

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.

Vice and virtue chiefly imply the relation of our actions to men in this world; sin and holiness rather imply their relation to God and the other world.

Faith makes blessed. Consequently it lies.

I taught Sunday school when I was younger, and ended up an elder in the church, and it just seemed to me that a lot of people who went to church certainly weren't - the rest of the week - living what I would call an Christian life.

To benefit by others' killing and to delude oneself into the belief that one is being very religions and nonviolent is sheer self-deception.

I believe in eight of the ten commandments. I believe in going to church every Sunday... unless there's a game on.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.