Jeremy Bentham Quotes

The pleasures of moral purity are available to those who fancy themselves a small-church militant in an unconverted world.

To what excesses do men rush for the sake of religion, of whose truth they are so little persuaded, and to whose precepts they pay so little regard!

Without moral progress, stimulated by faith in God, immorality in all its forms will proliferate and strangle goodness and human decency. Mankind will not be able to fully express the potential nobility of the human soul unless faith in God is strengthened.

I still think that if the human race, or even one nation, could only get right about its God the rest would follow.

So, is Hollywood anti-religion? Not in my opinion. But unlike, say, politicians and preachers who talk faith before going off to speak in tongues to their mistresses, Hollywood just doesn't wear its faith on its sleeve.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

The tension between the essence of spiritual teachings and the harmful fundamentalism that often arises in the name of religion is an issue that has engaged my mind practically as far back as I can remember.

The great test of life is obedience to God.

Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. But it takes religion to make good people do bad things.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

If Christianity were true, religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them, many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant.

For the love of the Faith [Islam] I became enemies of the Hindus and pagans.

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

If your religion does not make you holy, it will damn you. It is simply painted pageantry to go to hell in.

I think some people who say they're not Christians can behave in a more godly fashion than people who call themselves Christians.

Religion is all-too-often a refuge for scoundrels.

There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.

As long as there are religions, there are going to be people who are hiding their rottenness behind the veil of religion.

I'm ensuring my place in heaven.

You've got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven... I have the devil in me! If I didn't have, I'd be Christian!

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn't concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man's soul.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.