Quotes About Religious Conviction

#1. He'd once had a religious conviction, but had been acquitted through lack of evidence.

Nigel Cole

#2. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.

Ian McEwan

#3. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

#4. Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them.

Adolf Hitler

#5. There is a compassion in rational thought that is sometimes missing in religious conviction.

Ian McEwan

#6. But I think it is also important that we pay tribute and acknowledge another great principle, and that is the principle of religious conviction. Religious freedom has no significance unless it is accompanied by conviction.

John F. Kennedy

#7. If condoms and potentially microbicides can prevent millions of deaths [from AIDS], they should be made more widely available. I know that there are those who, out of sincere religious conviction, oppose such measures. And with these folks, I must respectfully but unequivocally disagree.

Barack Obama

#8. Religion and nationalism? I defecate on the altar of religious conviction, and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride.

Ian Martin

#9. She could have had an affair with him. He was a devout Muslim, as were all the guerrillas, but she doubted whether that would have made any difference. She believed what her father had used to say: "Religious conviction may thwart a timid desire but nothing can stand against genuine lust.

Ken Follett

#10. I've told you before, I don't comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I'm beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.

Gregory Maguire

#11. Do you think the Bible is accurate? I mean, do you think it's real?"
"I think Pastor Calvin is hot. In a fortysomething way. That pretty much sums up my religious conviction.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#12. More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction.

Maajid Nawaz

#13. To yield to the threat or actual use of violence is a surrender of one's self respect and religious conviction.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism.

Harold Laski

#15. 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

#16. This country was founded by men and women who were dedicated or came to be dedicated to two propositions; first, a strong religious conviction, and secondly a recognition that this conviction could flourish only under a system of freedom.

John F. Kennedy

#17. No Legislature can really destroy a religious conviction, except by exterminating its holders. It is historically too late to do that, and we shall live to see the drowned Egyptians on the seashore even yet.

Henry Parry Liddon

#18. As a politician who cherishes religious conviction in his personal sphere, but regards politics as a domain belonging outside religion, I believe that this view is seriously flawed.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#19. Indigestion: A disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the Western Wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: 'Plenty well, no pray; big belly ache, heap God.'

Ambrose Bierce

#20. People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Umberto Eco

#21. No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

Frederick C. Beiser

#22. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.

James Madison

#23. [...] the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the 'other,' the 'presence,' becomes the person of God.

Oliver Sacks

#24. In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds - that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

Robert H. Jackson

#25. To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.

Peter Medawar

#26. I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.

Wendy Kaminer

#27. It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#28. A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.

Albert Einstein

#29. Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization.

Slavoj Zizek

#30. Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all.

Elisabeth Elliot

#31. If I had been psychopathic enough to feel no remorse or religious enough to believe in redemption through a divine outside agency, perhaps I should have been happier; as it was I had neither the consolation that I was free of guilt, nor the conviction that I could ever be forgiven.

Stephen Fry

#32. I come of Quaker stock. My ancestors were persecuted for their beliefs. Here they sought and found religious freedom. By blood and conviction I stand for religious tolerance both in act and in spirit.

Herbert Hoover

#33. An irresistible passion that would induce me to believe in innate ideas and the truth of prophecy has decided my career. I have always loved liberty with the enthusiasm which actuates the religious man with the passion of a lover and with the conviction of a geometrician.

Marquis De Lafayette

#34. Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

James Madison

#35. Faith is holding onto uncertainties with passionate conviction.

Soren Kierkegaard

#36. The basis of all scientific work is the conviction that the world is an ordered and comprehensive entity, which is a religious sentiment. My religious feeling is a humble amazement at the order revealed in the small patch of reality to which our feeble intelligence is equal.

Albert Einstein

#37. The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God's name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel's 'miraculous' military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion's side.

Rick Perlstein

#38. We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.

John F. Kennedy