Top 100 Quotes About Religion And Morality
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#4. [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
#5. The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.
Fisher Ames
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#10. By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.
Bertrand Russell
#11. A church that is deeply aware of it's misery and nakedness before a holy God will cling tenaciously to an all sufficient Savior, while one that is self-confident and relatively unaware of its inherent sinfulness will reach for religion and morality whenever it seems convenient
Michael Horton
#12. The average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Mary McCarthy
#13. Religion and morality are critical to how students think about politics and form opinions on political issues.
Jeanne Shaheen
#14. 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
#15. Religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun.
Emma Goldman
#16. Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.
Fulton J. Sheen
#17. You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality which you misunderstood: but you wereable to destroy only yourself.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#18. The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.
Emma Goldman
#19. Segregation or separation is thus a basic principle of Biblical Law with respect to religion and morality. Every attempt to destroy this principle is an effort to reduce society to its lowest common denominator.
R.J. Rushdoony
#20. I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.
Charles Kingsley
#21. Piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of that state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.
Joseph Story
#22. We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism.
George W. Romney
#23. Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.
George Washington
#24. Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.
Samuel Johnson
#25. Huge imbalance in power has resulted in the alienation, rage, fury, and awful amoral terrorism that has erupted and is erupting at the present time. And in order to counter this, we need to make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a dynamic force in our world.
Karen Armstrong
#26. Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.
John Adams
#27. 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
#28. There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.
Henry Ward Beecher
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
#33. The study and practice of law ... does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of religion.
John Adams
#35. 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
#36. Without morality and ethics there is no religion (dharma), the foundation of religion is morality and ethics.
Dada Bhagwan
#37. Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
Christopher Hitchens
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
Thomas Huxley
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. We need religion for religions's sake, morality for morality's sake and art for art's sake.
Victor Cousin
#47. 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
#48. Christianity is at its purest a philosophy about a person, Jesus Christ, and at its dirtiest a philosophy about requirements and law.
Criss Jami
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.
Karl Kraus
#53. 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
#54. Religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary for good government ... Therefore schools and the means of educating the people should always be encouraged.
Thomas Jefferson
#55. Human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... would break the stronges cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.
John Adams
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. One can even buy a so-called Religion,
which is really but common morality sanctified with flowers and music. Rob the Church of her accessories and what remains behind?
Okakura Kakuzo
#61. The only impregnable citadel of virtue is religion; for there is no bulwark of mere morality, which some temptation may not overtop or undermine, and destroy.
Jane Porter
#62. But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector.
Immanuel Kant
#63. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?
Charlotte Bronte
#64. In the case of everything that belongs to the realm of sentiment, religion, politics, morality, the affections, and antipathies, etc. The most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals.
Gustave Le Bon
#65. One of the threats to Christianity in the 21st century is this idea that religion is best understood as a kind of aesthetic experience, and that you can get all your morality from that.
John Cornwell
#66. Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.
Jonathan Haidt
#67. If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
Richard Dawkins
#68. Religion blushing, veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires.
Alexander Pope
#70. 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
#71. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#72. Morality comes from religion? There are no Baptist babies or Catholic babies or Muslim babies. Religion is imposed on children by adults and society, and morality is an evolutionary adaptation. Period.
Kelli Jae Baeli
#73. Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.
Maria Edgeworth
#74. The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one.
Madame De Stael
#75. Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man's mind and knowledge.
George H. Smith
#76. With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook - that prissy little virtue, Temperance - for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.
Geoffrey Wood
#77. The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.
Huston Smith
#79. Sociologists and anthropologists tell us that religion has three dimensions: creed, code, and cult; or words, works, and worship; or theology, morality, and liturgy.
Peter Kreeft
#80. Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.
John Adams
#81. All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.
George Bernard Shaw
#82. Religion is, for the most part, our way of covering ourselves, a means of sewing respectability, morality, and charity into a patchwork garment that can hide our nakedness.
Michael S. Horton
#83. Separate religion from morality, and you have the true energy for evil within man, the terrible, cruel, devastating, and inhuman principle which naturally lies in his spirit. Here the division of the indivisible punishes itself most awfully.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#84. Morality has nothing to do with religion," she says. "You can do the right thing and not believe in God at all.
Jodi Picoult
#85. I'll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the "New Atheists") have argued in recent years.
Jonathan Haidt
#86. Remember, morality is God's standard, not humankind's standard. So it is important that we understand the process that God used to bring us his wisdom, truth and historical perspective.
Reid A. Ashbaucher
#87. It's not the law of religion nor the principles of morality that define our highways and pathways to God; only by the Grace of God are we led and drawn, to God. It is His grace that conquers a multitude of flaws and in that grace, there is only favor. Favor is not achieved; favor is received.
C. JoyBell C.
#88. We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.
James K.A. Smith
#89. Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!
Daniel Dennett
#90. Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.
Richard John Neuhaus
#91. Morality is totally God's standard, and his standards and conditions are revealed to us through his written word, the Scriptures (The Bible).
Reid A. Ashbaucher
#92. The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.
Jayne Anne Phillips
#93. Most people don't base their morality on religion in spite what they say. If you ask people, "If you didn't believe in God, would you go out and kill your neighbour?" Most people will say, "No".
Lawrence M. Krauss
#94. The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the preeminence of free government be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its citizens, and command the respect of the world.
George Washington
#95. In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.
Mark Twain
#96. In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
Sam Harris
#97. If you can't show the difference between religion and the Gospel, people will confuse morality with a changed heart
Timothy Keller
#98. 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
#99. Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.
Frances Power Cobbe
#100. The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.
Christopher Hitchens
