Richard Henry Tawney Quotes

Among the most important such false gods in our time is the United Nations, which has become a new religion that is worshipped to the exclusion of God… It issues documents and statements that openly contradict Islamic belief, such as International Declaration for Human Rights, considering all religions are equal, and considering that the destruction of the statues constitutes a crime.

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

Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.

The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.

We are, on the whole, an idolatrous people...

Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

Idolatry is really not good for anyone. Not even the idols.

Throughout the Old Testament, God warns his chosen people about the perils of assimilation, shiksappeal and false gods.

The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.

Banish afar the foul worship of idols. On their alters let the blood of animals smoke no more, nor the soothsayer look for omens in warm entrails, nor the meaningless augur attend to the song of birds. Let all the images of the gods be smashed to the ground.

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

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

The man molds the idol and then the idol molds the man.

And if you cast down an idol, there's nothing left.

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality - the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else.

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

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

People were never meant to be idols. We aren't supposed to be worshipped. Only God deserves that kind of praise.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

The world has not gone one step beyond idolatry yet.

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.