Top 86 Quotes About Morality Without Religion
#1. I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.
Alan Dershowitz
#2. Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.
Mark Hopkins
#3. Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#4. Just as Man developed morals and ethical behavior over thousands of years of evolution; so, too, did he invent an authority figure to enforce these behaviors - God.
Lex Allen
#5. A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.
William Winwood Reade
#6. If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!
Adam Sedgwick
#7. As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. Christianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.
Austin Phelps
#9. Piety and morality are but the same spirit differently manifested. Piety is religion with its face toward God; morality is religion with its face toward the world.
Tryon Edwards
#10. If the empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained?
John Adams
#11. Human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... would break the stronges cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.
John Adams
#12. Religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary for good government ... Therefore schools and the means of educating the people should always be encouraged.
Thomas Jefferson
#13. Christian religion defines morality by a belief system based on a master-slave relationship, and rooted in resentment of the raw beauty and power of the life force.
John Lamb Lash
#14. Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.
Karl Kraus
#15. Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.
Robert W. Cox
#16. The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.
Richard M. Rorty
#17. As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
Rowan Atkinson
#19. And so, one of the reasons why I started my Charter for Compassion, was to bring the Golden Rule back to the center of religion and morality and not put other's secondary goals, less demand goals, into the forefront
Karen Armstrong
#20. In France, religion had been considered the enemy of liberty, but in America, as George Washington expressed it, religion and morality were the 'twin pillars of freedom.'
D. James Kennedy
#21. The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.
Fulton J. Sheen
#22. When religion talks about our aspirations and our sense of morality, I do not believe that science can contradict it. However, when religion contradicts science on matters of fact, religion must yield.
Frank Wilczek
#23. Christianity is at its purest a philosophy about a person, Jesus Christ, and at its dirtiest a philosophy about requirements and law.
Criss Jami
#24. It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.
Max Weber
#25. We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. John Adams, second president of the United States, wrote that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people ... George Washington warned us never to indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Joe Lieberman
#27. Morality exists in the neurons as a natural sensation. Religion only tries to codify it.
Abhijit Naskar
#28. Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.
Benjamin Franklin
#29. Those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion or politics ... The things that will destroy us are: politics without principles, pleasures without conscience, knowledge without character, business without morality.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.
Abhijit Naskar
#31. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
George Washington
#32. When institutional religion diminishes, when religion is "private" without churches, morality begins to go, then belief in God, and then anything is acceptable.
Anonymous
#33. Be your own master, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal creature.
Marcus Aurelius
#34. Tis certain that Morality is an indispensable Requisite of true Religion, and there can be none without it. But it would become the Pride and Ignorance of Pagans only, to magnify it, as the Whole of what is necessary.
Samuel Richardson
#36. The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious.
Patrick Marnham
#37. Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#38. Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.
Frances Power Cobbe
#39. To learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#40. You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [ ... ] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.
Terry Pratchett
#41. Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.
George Washington
#42. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#43. Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel
#44. Morality is the fruit of religion: to desire the former without the latter is to desire an orange without an orange-tree.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#45. A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle.
#46. [I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.
John Adams
#47. Modern societies march towards morality in proportion as they leave religion behind.
Paul Bert
#49. The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.
Charles Dickens
#51. If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ... Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.
Thomas Jefferson
#53. We have to get over the idea that there's some right way to live.
Marty Rubin
#55. The study and practice of law ... does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of religion.
John Adams
#56. Books of the sages of the ages reflect upon in stages; like honey their words on the tongue give due savour."
{Source: A Green Desert Father}
Richard Mc Sweeney
#57. We spoke of religion, and how much of it is just a custom preserving practical codes of health, morality and justice that are no longer necessary for group survival (like not eating animals with cloven hooves).
Marilyn Manson
#58. Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.
Horace Greeley
#59. The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone, that renders us invincible.
Patrick Henry
#60. The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility. The danger is here now
not only from a military enemy but from an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#61. There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.
Henry Ward Beecher
#62. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
#63. Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.
John Adams
#64. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Charlotte Bronte
#65. One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.
Arthur C. Clarke
#66. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
Herman Melville
#68. Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.
Irving Stone
#70. In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. I come only to ask a simple question. Is Muad'Dib's death to be followed by the moral suicide of all men? Is that the inevitable aftermath of a Messiah?
Frank Herbert
#73. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'
that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.
Timothy Keller
#74. The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God).
Alice Von Hildebrand
#75. Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
Thomas Huxley
#76. A moral life, without reference to religion, is like a house built upon sand. And religion, divorced from morality, is like sounding brass, good only for making a noise and breaking heads.
Mahatma Gandhi
#77. We need religion for religions's sake, morality for morality's sake and art for art's sake.
Victor Cousin
#78. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
Henry Miller
#80. Religion, when realized truly, can provide an extremely accurate moral compass to the human conscience, while politics on the other hand, when utilized properly can ensure the wellbeing of the society.
Abhijit Naskar
#81. Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Aldous Huxley
#82. There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.
Steve Allen
#83. Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
Christopher Hitchens
#84. The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.
Fisher Ames
#85. Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#86. Without morality and ethics there is no religion (dharma), the foundation of religion is morality and ethics.
Dada Bhagwan
