Sigmund Freud Quotes

I was raised a Catholic and when you're raised a Catholic they don't teach you to think for yourself. You're taught not to think too deeply about things.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about...Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don't have all the answers, to think that they do.

In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination

Because religious training means credulity training, churches should not be surprised to find that so many of their congregations accept astrology as readily as theology, or a channeled Atlantean priest as readily as a biblical prophet.

When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Finding that no religion was based upon facts, but that all of them were in opposition to facts, and could not therefore be true, I began to reflect upon what must be the condition of mankind, trained from infancy to believe in these errors, and to make them the rule of their conduct.

I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

When a person is determined to believe something, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

I was reluctant to be critical of the United States because I thought the United States could do no wrong; that the government could not lie to its people.

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

If we think every word in every holy book is true, then we have created an idol.

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

How sad it is that these great gentlemen should believe what anyone tells them and do not choose to judge for themselves! But it is always so.

Westboro's fire and brimstone message was the air I breathed all my life. But after joining Twitter at the age of 23, I encountered people who challenged my beliefs and unearthed contradictions my blind faith had missed.

No ideology should ever get a pass simply because it is cloaked in a religious robe.

People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.

Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.