Religious Morality Quotes

#1. The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.

Richard Dawkins

#2. 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

#3. Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality.

Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

#4. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.

George Washington

#5. 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

#6. Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed.

Douglas Wilson

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

Michele Bachmann

#8. 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

#9. The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Sam Harris

#10. 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

#11. A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

Joan D. Chittister

#12. The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesn't sin but wants to sin.

Criss Jami

#13. 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

#14. The values derived from religious belief will not - and should not - be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.

Mario Cuomo

#15. Secularism denounces supernaturalism and promotes a nonreligious or antireligious basis of social organization and morality.

Carl F. H. Henry

#16. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

Albert Einstein

#17. All this talk about morality, chastity, prudence and the like are very antiquated notions created by some very old belief systems that are notoriously negative towards women.

Roberto Hogue

#18. Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

Virginia Woolf

#19. Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#20. I do not judge the individual based on their belief. If I were to, then I would, undoubtedly, be no better than the (religious) system that I frown upon.

Travis Culliton

#21. Nothing in any religious teachings goes beyond Humanism, unless you add the supernatural...Make believe is the only difference between being human and being religious.

Travis Culliton

#22. To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Joseph Addison

#23. 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

#24. Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

Abhijit Naskar

#25. In our generation there is no agreed-upon framework. All issues are up for grabs. Morality no longer has any broad-based theology upon which to rest its case. We are no longer a 'Christian nation,' not even a 'Judeo-Christian culture.'

F. LaGard Smith

#26. Concerning the press and politicians, the hatred for all such evangelical groups is not because of their real or fancied blunders but because they have reintroduced biblical morality into politics.

R.J. Rushdoony

#27. Morality exists in the neurons as a natural sensation. Religion only tries to codify it.

Abhijit Naskar

#28. 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

#29. Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?

Dan Barker

#30. For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell

Justin Cronin

#31. Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality.

Linus Torvalds

#32. So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.

Huston Smith

#33. In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club.

Mario Cuomo

#34. It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.

Jane Asher

#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. Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help the stranger in need was not compassion, morality, or religious creed. It was those who had the time. Makes me wonder if I have time to do good.

Richard Paul Evans

#37. If the American public is so into morality in movies, why don't they throw more of their disposable income at religious-themed entertainment? For every 'Passion of the Christ,' there's a 'Fireproof' that comes and goes with no notice.

John Ridley

#38. Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.

Erma Bombeck

#39. Boy lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers ... are not child molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents who force their staid morality onto the young people in their custody.

Patrick Califia

#40. Morality in its noblest forms remains inexplicable unless one takes into account that power of growth in the human soul which has led generation after generation from lower religious and ethical standards to higher ones which often clash with worldly advantages.

Ellen Key

#41. 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

#42. I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

Mahatma Gandhi

#43. His system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers ... He was the most innocent, the most benevolent, the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.

Thomas Jefferson

#44. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.

C.S. Lewis

#45. Religious people today, compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.

Steven Pinker

#46. 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

#47. To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

Edward W. Said

#48. 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

#49. Christianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.

Austin Phelps

#50. It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.

David Barton

#51. 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

#52. Every man who loves his country, or wishes well to the best interests of society, will show himself a decided friend not only of morality and the laws, but of religious institutions, and honorably bear his part in supporting them.

Josiah Johnson Hawes

#53. Only Atheists have morals, the religious have reward and punishment. That's not morality, that's sucking up.

Penn Jillette

#54. I guess it was but I think peoples morality has changed. It's gotten more liberal and more diverse and even in a sense much more fundamental, you take the fundamental religious right in this country, its got to go back about 50 years.

Larry Hagman

#55. We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#56. The divine element manifests itself (or show up) in man as well by his aptitude for science, than by his aptitude for virtue. True morality, true philosophy and true art are in their essence ("dans leur essence", Fr.) religious.

African Spir