Religion And Superstition Quotes

#1. When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.

Philip Jenkins

#2. I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge.

Baruch Spinoza

#3. Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.

Andre Malraux

#4. In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies ...

Joseph McCabe

#5. The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural.

David Gibson

#6. There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

#7. Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

Cesar Nascimento

#8. A great fear, when it is ill-managed, is the parent of superstition; but a discreet and well-guided fear produces religion.

Jeremy Taylor

#9. Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#10. The Sabbath, as now recognized and enforced, is one of the main pillars of Priestcraft and Superstition, and the stronghold of a merely ceremonial Religion.

William Lloyd Garrison

#11. A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the
state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion,
of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the
fashionable idols!

Ludwig Von Mises

#12. What pity that Religion and Love, which heighten our relish for the things of both worlds, should ever run the human heart into enthusiasm, superstition, or uncharitableness!

Samuel Richardson

#13. Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

Robert G. Ingersoll

#14. Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#15. Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.

Odin Zeus McGaffer

#16. Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.

E. Haldeman-Julius

#17. Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.

David McCullough

#18. Patriotism is a superstition, one far more injurious, brutal and inhumane than religion.

Gustave Herve

#19. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not

Richard Dawkins

#20. They may be all comprehended under three heads - 1st, Superstition; 2d, Power; 3d, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.

Thomas Paine

#21. Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition.

Paul Kenneth Keller

#22. Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition ... [and therefore] 'On to God!

Max Planck

#23. That the corruption of the best thing produces the worst, is grown into a maxim, and is commonly proved, among other instances, by the pernicious effects of superstition and enthusiasm, the corruptions of true religion.

David Hume

#24. I like to say magic is the world's second oldest profession, a mystical and often awe-inspiring spectacle that, throughout the ages, has blended superstition, trickery and religion.

Criss Angel

#25. Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#26. Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.

Mark Hopkins

#27. America's forefathers had a vision of a spiritually enlightened utopia, in which freedom of thought, education of the masses, and scientific advancement would replace the darkness of outdated religious superstition.

Dan Brown

#28. I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

Thornton Wilder

#29. A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#30. My religious superstition gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more happy day by day ...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#31. In paganism light is mixed with darkness, and religion and truth are blended with superstition and error.

Lindley Murray

#32. What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams

Gary Snyder

#33. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,

Carl Sagan

#34. From a historical viewpoint, religion is just a kind of superstition, and from a political viewpoint it is a tool of social control.

Mario Bunge

#35. Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.

Elbert Hubbard

#36. You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

Dan Barker

#37. What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Christopher Hitchens

#38. The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]

George Gaylord Simpson

#39. The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#40. Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Pope John Paul II

#41. [We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#42. That not adhering to those notions Reason dictates (concerning the nature of God), has been the occasion of all superstition, and those innumerable mischiefs that mankind (on account of religion) have done to themselves or to one another.

Matthew Tindal

#43. I look at what we call faith, and all I see is superstition and subjugation. All religions [ ... ] They create false divisions, and enslave us to fantasies, when we need to focus on the here and now.

Helene Wecker

#44. The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely - which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.

Sydney J. Harris

#45. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

Anne Nicol Gaylor

#46. The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

Robert Bork

#47. More than Christianity, the religion of Victorian times was a belief in human advance - the conviction that freed from ignorance and superstition, humanity could expand its power and be master of its destiny.

John N. Gray

#48. And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

Thomas Hobbes

#49. 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

#50. That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe.

Adolf Von Harnack

#51. Deep scientific psychoanalysis reveals that excessive beliefs and dependence on religion is a superstition and fear induced psychiatric disease.

Debasish Mridha

#52. Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.

Edmund Burke

#53. I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

James Buchanan

#54. Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

Federico Fellini

#55. For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean S. Kamali