Henry Adams Quotes

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like - full of cruelty and hypocrisy.

It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible. And the laws, as they stand today, are almost inconceivably stupid. With all this brilliant scientific knowledge of atom splitting and nuclear physics, etc., we are still worshipping at different shrines, imprisoning homosexuals, imposing unnecessary and completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. Hearts can be withdrawn from human beasts, dead hearts, and, after a little neat manipulation, popped back again as good as new. The skies can be conquered. Sputniks can whiz round and round the globe and be controlled and guided. People are still genuflecting before crucifixes and Virgin Marys, still persecuting other people for being coloured or Jewish or in some way different from what they apparently should be. There are wars being waged at this very moment in Indonesia, Algeria, the Middle East, Cyprus, etc. The Pope still makes pronouncements against birth control. The Ku-Klux-Klan is still, if permitted, ready to dash out and do some light lynching. God, for millions of people, is still secure in his heaven, and My Fair Lady opened in London last night.

Only the tortured can understand those who have been tortured.

God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways.

Belief in God hurts my people.

I cannot bear to live where there is so much injustice and I cannot do something about it. What kind of a torturous life is that?

I am used to hear bad men misuse the name of God, yet God exists.

Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?

I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.

Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty, and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment.

At the very center of our culture is a crucified man, a tortured man hanging on a cross of wood. You have an image of violence at the very center of our spiritual investigation.

[Dom Juan] believes neither in Heaven, nor the saints, nor God, nor the Werewolf.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it's such a common, constant thing in people's lives - a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it's just accepted.

A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity

Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.

Deadly little Miho. She won't let you feel a thing unless she wants you to. She twists the blade. He feels it.

People having religions is an insult to the universe.

They smiled in their pains and laughed to scorn those who inflicted torments on them, resigned up their souls with great alacrity, expecting to receive them again.

I'm still an atheist, thank God.

Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race.

Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

A hot stake is better than a cold chop.

Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings ... let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the evil torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

Have faith that when bad things happen to you, I belief in an after life, it is better to suffer here on Earth than what awaits you. That is why I pray for pain, and I get it. I do.