Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope.
Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.
To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!
All human belief systems are inherently flawed.
We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.
The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.
I'm fascinated by the business of belief, obviously, because it's so ever present with humanity anyway. And, you know, when you have science, which constantly talks of proofs, you have religion, which constantly talks of beliefs and faith and so on.
If we did not have the impulse and ability to believe in the impossible, we would not have religion, democracy, or marriage.
Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.
The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.
The belief of immortality is impressed upon all men, and all men act under an impression of it, however they may talk, and though, perhaps, they may be scarcely sensible of it.
Man has always needed to believe in some form of a continuity of achievement.
It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.
