Steve Allen Quotes

The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it.

The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.

And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benevolent in the heart of man.

I've taken up the Bible again, somewhat in the spirit of W.C. Fields - looking for loopholes.

The Bible is the best of books, and I wish it were in the hands of every one. It is indispensable to the safety and permanence of our institutions. A free government can not exist without religion and morals, and there cannot be morals without religion. Especially should the Bible be placed in the hands of the young. It is the best school book in the world. I would that all our people were brought up under the influence of that holy book.

Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."

I read the Bible, I speak through issues, I see what I think is hypocrisy in the church and things that are wrong, and I speak to these things. But I could be wrong.

There is no possible source of evil except good.

I don't think good and evil are polarized.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death.

I am thankful that the church exists, thankful that it has done such great things, giving us laws, for instance - 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not', and established Goodness and Evil. That's what all religions do, and as soon as we try to replace them, worldly religions like fascism and communism take over.

I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend - just as if it were a novel - very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly.

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

I really think the Bible is a baseline where all stories come from. All of the zillion stories in the Bible provide inspiration for everything.

We have used the Bible as if it was a mere special constable's handbook — an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded — a mere book to keep the poor in order.

The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.

It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another...We must begin by doing away with this convention.

In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

The Bible, taken as a whole, can be used to praise or condemn practically any human activity, thought, belief, or practice.