Voltaire Quotes

Kiss the feet of Popes provided their hands are tied.

The first thing we complain of here is, that the people are entertained with showy ceremonies, while not a word is said of their significance and truth.

People should never worship images. The spread of mental darkness is due to the prevalence of idolatry.

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

The Christian is an idol breaker.

When you worship an idol, you're substituting a thing for the ultimate.

I worship God. Religion and worship are two different things to me. Religion is by the book. I think too many people rely on the textbook: 'OK, it says to do this and it says to do that, so if I do this, this, and that, then I still can go out and do wrong because I did this, this, and that.'

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.

Amen" Lula said and she made the sign of the cross. "I thought you were Baptist." "Yeah, but we don't got any hand signals for an occasion like this.

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.

Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.

I was born and raised in the University of Chicago area and had an uneventful middle-class Catholic childhood. I had a heavy Catholic upbringing and Catholicism is terrible - it's the reason there were slaves. Mass every morning at seven o'clock during Lent. It's a totally negative, man-made religion.

Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes

You can't discover one foot of clay on an idol without suspecting the other.

Idolatry is permissible in Hinduism when it sub serves an ideal.

We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God's commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. . . . This leads to frightful results. . . . The British State considers it the duty of an Englishman to kill people who are not English whenever a collection of elderly gentlemen in Westminster tells him to do so. . . . Church and State are placable enemies of both intelligence and virtue.

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

I have always condemned Liberal Catholicism and I will condemn it again forty times over if it be necessary.

The Pope is a mere tormentor of conscience. The assembly of his greased and religious crew in praying was altogether like the croaking of frogs, which edified nothing at all.

You think when Jesus comes back, he really wants to see a cross? That's like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on.