Lincoln Steffens Quotes

If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish - if a little more enlightened, religion would perish.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.

The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition.

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

Religion is not removed by removing superstition.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

I have noticed that many who do not believe in God believe in everything else, even in the evil eye.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

There will always be those little minds who, out of vanity or intellectual display, will attempt to destroy faith in the very foundations of life.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

There are men who think themselves too wise to be religious.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.