Quotes About Religious Faith

#1. It becomes clear that, given our diversity, no single religion satisfies all humanity. ... And since the majority does not practice religion, I am concerned to try to find a way to serve all humanity without appealing to religious faith.

Dalai Lama

#2. I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It's always a really cool perspective.

Mallory Ortberg

#3. Often our students see nothing about religious faith except the lowest common denominator. They see nothing but TV evangelists and fools, and it doesn't occur to them that intelligent people might find this religious business worth living their lives by.

Doris Betts

#4. I wish I had the gift of religious faith. Sometimes I long to believe in a structured universe designed purposefully for mankind.

Adib Khan

#5. With our goddess, the Pachamama, and it is not possible to continue having a monopoly of religious faith, only Catholic. We have therefore adopted the new constitution as a secular state where all religious beliefs will be respected.

Evo Morales

#6. I guess my religious faith sustained me more than anything else. Family is also very important. If I didn't have children, it would have been too difficult. Even if you are strong, you still need people who would support you all the way.

Corazon Aquino

#7. I think having some sort of religious faith can be helpful for many people, because it kind of puts things in perspective a bit.

Dave Smalley

#8. Even if you're not a Catholic, even if you're not a Christian, in fact even if you have no religious faith at all, what people could see in Pope John Paul was a man of true and profound spiritual faith.

Chris Matthews

#9. Those of religious faith see time as evidence of god. For surely nothing could be created without a creator. Nothing could be universal and not be divine. All absolutes are part of the One Absolute.

Alan Lightman

#10. Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#11. I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

Jimmy Carter

#12. Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he [man] concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy and sadness that accompany them.

Erich Fromm

#13. As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith.

Mark Hatfield

#14. At the heart of my argument is the view that religious faith, far from being inevitably on the side of the status quo, should on principle hold this world to higher standards.

E.J. Dionne Jr.

#15. Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

William A. Dembski

#16. Already at sixteen, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms: one spiritual, the other earthly.

Michelangelo

#17. The marriage of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored in all cultures and by every religious faith. It's in this institution that children are meant to be nurtured. We know this after thousands of years of human experience.

Jeff Miller

#18. Religious faith is not a storm cellar to which men and women
can flee for refuge from the storms of life. It is instead, an
inner spiritual strength which enables them to face those
storms with hope and serenity.

Sam Ervin

#19. Emotions, he was certain, were unreliable and irrelevant to the labor of religious faith.

Michael D. O'Brien

#20. Religious faith may very well be considered a science, for it responds invariably to certain formulae. Perform the technique of faith according to the laws which have been proved workable in human experience and you will always get a result of power.

Norman Vincent Peale

#21. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.

Sam Harris

#22. Close investigation will show that the primary cause of oppression and injustice, of unrighteousness, irregularity and disorder, is the people's lack of religious faith and the fact that they are uneducated.

Abdu'l- Baha

#23. Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

Robert Anton Wilson

#24. I always emphasize that it is much safer and better to keep one's own religious faith. The other major religions are thousands of years old and have long traditions.

Dalai Lama

#25. For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism.

Alister E. McGrath

#26. Religious faith as a whole induces various health benefits in the general population through complex biological processes.

Abhijit Naskar

#27. Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values.

Kenneth D. Wald

#28. If we accept the logic of the Declaration, reverence for God is not just a matter of religious faith, it is the foundation of justice and citizenship in our republic.

Alan Keyes

#29. If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.

Dalai Lama

#30. This Nation was established by men who believed in God ... You will see the evidence of this deep religious faith on every hand.

Harry S. Truman

#31. No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them

Elie Wiesel

#32. My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.

Dalai Lama

#33. The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#34. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my
country.

Upton Sinclair

#35. A life based on [religious] faith is a life based on pure speculation, and speculation is, by its very definition, unsound.

Michael Vito Tosto

#36. I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic, which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.

Jimmy Carr

#37. The rigid volunteer rules of right and wrong in sports are second only to religious faith in moral training.

Herbert Hoover

#38. Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes--through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#39. Culture derives its meaning from man's faith in God; it is never an end in itself, but always a means of expressing one's religious faith.

Henry R. Van Til

#40. The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

Charles Eliot Norton

#41. My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.

William Lyon Phelps

#42. Religious faith to W. H. Bragg was the willingness to stake his all on the hypothesis that Christ was right, and test it by a lifetime's experiment in charity.

Guglielmo Marconi

#43. Doing science is not inherently incompatible with religious faith.

George Coyne

#44. Philosophical probing could be allowed to the educated, as long as the mass of people were not disturbed in the comfort of their religious faith. But the

Malveena McKendrick

#45. I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#46. The final test of religious faith ... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#47. We believe that if the world doesn't go quickly to an end, it will be only because Hitlerism transformed itself into a new religious faith, able to change the materialistic man of today into a new idealistic hero where the 'beyond life' is as important as life itself.

Miguel Serrano

#48. Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.

Alan Moore

#49. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.

Richard Dawkins

#50. I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong; my strength is just somewhere else
it's in myself ... I do not fear what may await me, though I'm equally confident that nothing awaits.

Jon Krakauer

#51. How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?

Jon Krakauer

#52. Enlightenment is not meant to be an object of religious faith. It is an evolutionary goal, something we want to become ...

Robert Thurman

#53. Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#54. History does not end. It is a timeless repetition of human folly and correction. It follows that there is no single model of how to organise society. Who, barring those of religious faith, can say that view is wrong?

Edward Luce

#55. A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these "experts" have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully.

Wolfgang Smith

#56. My love for her was close to piety. You may think it strange that I should use this word, with its religious connotation, to describe my feeling towards a woman. But even now I believe - and I believe it very strongly - that true love is not so far removed from religious faith.

Soseki Natsume

#57. It strikes me as odd that the free exercise of religious faith is sometimes treated as a problem, something America is stuck with instead of blessed with.

Mitt Romney

#58. I'm not in favor of the government mandating a prayer in school because our country was founded on the fact that no particular religious faith would have ascendance over or preferential treatment over any other.

Jimmy Carter

#59. If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed.

T. S. Eliot

#60. The Constitution had provided that all the public functionaries of the Union ... should be under oath or affirmation for its support. The homage of religious faith was thus superadded to all the obligations of temporal law to give it strength.

John Quincy Adams

#61. Religious faith has something of the same character as falling in love (and both have many of the attributes of being high on an addictive drug*

Richard Dawkins

#62. The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.

Richard Dawkins

#63. Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly natural to me. It is also perfectly natural for the many scientists I know who are also people of deep religious faith.

William Daniel Phillips

#64. As a philosopher, I have a right to ask for a rational explanation of religious faith.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#65. The irony is, of course, that many of the values that I was raised with, that I think are very important, that I hold dear, are the result of a religious faith.

Steve Coogan

#66. Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#67. Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.

Richard Dawkins

#68. I'm the world's least happy atheist. I miss having religious faith, but trying to have it seems like trying to be in love with someone that you're not in love with.

Lisa Williams

#69. Nothing but religious faith has been able to save men from despair.

Hugh B. Brown

#70. The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error.

Thomas Jefferson

#71. The people of Israel, like those of the United States, are imbued with a religious faith and a sense of moral values

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#72. Morals are built on religious faith. Virtue is built on morality and influences a culture.

Michele Bachmann

#73. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

Richard Dawkins

#74. Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.

Louis Auchincloss

#75. It's important to ask candidates about their beliefs, in part because politicians frequently exploit religious faith - often with the idea that voters will be more likely to unthinkingly accept certain political positions so long as they arise from religious belief.

Gary Bauer

#76. Our religious faith gives us the answer to the false beliefs of Communism ... I have the feeling that God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.

Harry S. Truman

#77. I believe that religious faith schools are highly dubious.

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#78. The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?

Jerry A. Coyne

#79. I'm very keen on having true freedom of expression. True freedom of faith. And free practice of religious faith.

Mohammed Morsi

#80. Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.

Sam Harris

#81. Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic

Michael Shermer

#82. In Barack Obama, Democrats have put forth a man of strong religious faith who is comfortable connecting his spiritual life to his public role as a policymaker.

Mike McCurry

#83. Saul is a devout believer only in himself, and he was convinced that the religious faith of others, if manipulated skillfully, was an excellent path to the power he sought. He was studying religions of the world in order to pick up tips on how to build his own.

Rysa Walker

#84. Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.

William James

#85. What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

Barbara Kingsolver

#86. The government and the church are two different realms of service, and those in political office have to face a subtle but important difference between the implementation of the high ideals of religious faith and public duty.

Jimmy Carter

#87. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.

Roger Scruton

#88. In the founding era of our country, it was not organized religion but personal faith that brought focus and unified the early leadership-maybe an unspoken faith in God, and certain values that came with that faith. So in that sense, we cannot discount, in my judgment, religious faith in politics.

Billy Graham

#89. I don't mean religious faith. I mean faith in our own abilities. We have to do the best we can with the talents we have, Geordie. The future is too unpredictable for anxiety.

James Runcie

#90. Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.

Mahatma Gandhi

#91. Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.

Sam Harris

#92. Religious faith always transcends culture, and is the integrating principle and power of man's cultural striving.

Henry R. Van Til

#93. The connection between religious faith and mental disorder is, from the viewpoint of the tolerant and the "multicultural," both very obvious and highly unmentionable.

Christopher Hitchens

#94. Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral

Arthur C. Clarke

#95. Christians today are forced to support, with their tax money, the establishment of another religious faith that stands opposed to everything they believe. The new state church has taken the form of the public school.

Benjamin Hart

#96. While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.

Jon Meacham

#97. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Richard Dawkins

#98. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

Sam Harris

#99. Let's keep people with weird religious faiths out of government. Especially those who have a weird religious faith IN government.

David Burge

#100. It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus, the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong, and about the law, just punishment and discipline.

Kamisese Mara