Suzanne LaFollette Quotes

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Religion has endured since the dawn of human consciousness precisely because it encompasses so much of being human. No idea has endured so long, gathered up so many disparate needs and wants and feelings, and inspired so many different paths towards understanding it.

When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Where a bad custom has been in existence for any length of time, most people grow to regard it as part of the order of nature.

For a while, I became an atheist; now that I'm grown up, though, I'm not hard-edged enough to be an atheist. Even though I live with a flaming atheist, I love going to temple. I love all the rituals.

I concluded that all religions had the same foundation - a belief in the supernatural - a power above nature that man could influence by worship - by sacrifice and prayer.

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

I believe religion is man-made.

I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist.

I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

Religious traditions are in a constant state of development and renewed self-understanding.

I was raised a Catholic. But I am not religious. In my work, I am interested in real flesh and blood.

Religion can be both good and bad - it is spirituality that counts.

People aren't religious because it's easy not to be. Like anything, it's habitual, and once it's a habit it's no longer hard.