Religious War Quotes

#1. The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.

H.L. Mencken

#2. Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.

Uri Avnery

#3. I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.

Dave Brubeck

#4. President Bush was widely ridiculed for consulting the Reverend Billy Graham before the Gulf war.

William Bennett

#5. It's changed dramatically in our lifetimes. Communism is gone, so now the global war is framed in religious terms. Fundamentalist religion is rampant on all sides of this war. It casts a very dark shadow over non-fundamentalist religion.

Zachary Lazar

#6. The worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.

Ayn Rand

#7. We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.

Abraham Lincoln

#8. If there ever was a religious war full of terror, it was the crusades. But you can't blame Christianity because a few adventurers did this. That's my message.

Moustapha Akkad

#9. Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who ... even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.

Susan Jacoby

#10. Drugs, sex, Satan, and power, Eve mused. A religious war? Hadn't humans fought and died for beliefs since the dawn of time? Animals fought for territory; people fought for territory as well. And for gain, for passion, for beliefs. For the hell of it.

J.D. Robb

#11. 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

#12. Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

Quentin Crisp

#13. [The war on terrorism isn't a religious war, but] a defense of our right to make moral choices, to seek fellowship with God that is chosen and not commanded.

John Ashcroft

#14. We're in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil.

Tim LaHaye

#15. Throughout history, religious wars have always been the most brutal and cruel and merciless.

Al Gore

#16. If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.

Miguel Ruiz

#17. So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!

John Godfrey Saxe

#18. I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

Montesquieu

#19. Killing in the name of religion defines someone who is ignorant and actually void of religion. God does not condone terror. To kill innocent people to make a political statement is like shooting a dove to say hunting is wrong.

Suzy Kassem

#20. Humanity has understood nothing. Religious, tribal, national wars continue. The world continues to be in a sea of blood.

Irena Sendler

#21. Donohue: "It is Christianity that [Manson] hates, and it is Catholicism that he hates most of all. This guy is at war with Christ." Manson: "I can't possibly be at war with Christ, because your religion killed him and what he stood for. But if you want to be at war with me, bring it on."

Marilyn Manson

#22. Jealousy destroys the matrimonies; jealousy destroys the friendships, jealousy provokes religious wars, fratricidal hates, murderers and all kind of suffering.

Samael Aun Weor

#23. Politicians used AIDS to energize anti-gay supporters and religious conservatives who heralded it as a consequence of immorality. Pat Buchanan, an adviser to President Reagan, declared, "The poor homosexuals - they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." A

Sean Strub

#24. Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide.

Albert Ellis

#25. This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this.

Mary Heaton Vorse

#26. I had my religious crisis after the war, not during the war.

Elie Wiesel

#27. America became a special source of attraction to people who were fleeing the aftereffects of the 30 Years War and the religious persecution that began to sweep through Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And when people got here, very often they succeeded.

Mitch Horowitz

#28. In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.

Isabel Allende

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

William Lyon Phelps

#30. Christianity doesn't come into it. George Bush and Tony Blair are not Christians. Religious people believe in the prophets, peace be upon them. Bush believes in the profits and how to get a piece of them. So don't ever confuse this with a war of civilizations.

George Galloway

#31. We've gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we've all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it's been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.

Michael Scheuer

#32. The religious wars showed that the Christian faith was no longer Europe's unifying force. A new common ground was needed, and it was found in reason, which is something that is shared by all of mankind. This was one of the roots of the Enlightenment and its concept of universal human rights.

Walter Kasper

#33. Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#34. The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#35. We will not stand for it any more. No more lies. No more pre-emptive, illegal war, based on false information. No more
God-is-on-our-side religious nonsense to justify this immoral, illegal war. We are here to say most fundamentally, no more inhumanity in the name of our nation.

Rocky Anderson

#36. The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror.

Melanie Phillips

#37. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.

Stephen V Monsma

#38. If there's a God in heaven, what's he waiting for? If He can't hear the children, then he must see the war.

Elton John

#39. What I do know is that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been converted into the closest thing the West has to religious-like martyrs in the war against radical Islam, which means that anything short of pure reverence for them generates tribal rage and vilification.

Glenn Greenwald

#40. The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe

#41. Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?

William Shakespeare

#42. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

George Orwell

#43. Actually, they (extremists) wanted to take this opportunity to mobilize the people for the religious unification and to divert the government's attention from other issues in the war against terrorism. So they are using this issue as a matter of unity.

Shahbaz Bhatti

#44. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C.S. Lewis

#45. People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#46. Most of the ugly wars in history have been wars of religion. And there's nothing more dangerous than someone with religious certitude who creates consequences in the world that to me are simply inexcusable.

Sam Hamill

#47. War and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.

John F. Kennedy

#48. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.

Ellen Willis

#49. We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.

Konrad Lorenz

#50. 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

#51. Love is always the first casualty of a religious war, the second is Truth and the third...Humanity.

Jason Versey

#52. History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.

Montesquieu

#53. Religion is the cause of all the problems in the world. I don't believe in organized religion at all. It's what separates people. One religion just represents fragments, it causes war. More people have died because of religious conflict than any other reason.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#54. Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.

Walker Evans

#55. Guess that's thirty-one pieces of silver you've got now, huh? Sleep well, Judas.

Mark Millar

#56. Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#57. The bloodiest, most brutal wars fought, all based on religious hatred. Which is fine with me! Any time a bunch of holy people want to go out and kill each other I'm a happy guy!

George Carlin

#58. In what might come as a surprise to religious conservatives and other proponents of early marriage, Mintz reports that apart from the period following World War II, most Americans did not wed until their mid- or even late 20s or early 30s.

Anonymous

#59. For the sake of peace, religious beliefs must never be allowed to be abused in the cause of violence and war.

Pope Francis

#60. Those people who want to express their religious beliefs on public property should enjoy the same rights that we provide to those protesting the war in Iraq.

Ernest Istook

#61. Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

Robert Anton Wilson

#62. What are the chances that of all 1.59629 quadrillion square feet of physical land on planet Earth, three major world religions are literally fighting over one single rock?

Jared Brock

#63. The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

Susan Jacoby

#64. Christendom and heathendom now stand face to face ... At bottom is a violent and irreconcilable quarrel about the nature of God and the nature of an and the ultimate nature of the universe; it is a war of dogma.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#65. When I visited Guantanamo Bay several years ago, I met a team of psychiatrists treating the detainees. When I asked how they distinguished between, say, schizophrenia or bipolarity and a bedrock religious commitment to holy war, they couldn't answer.

Monica Crowley

#66. The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that.

John Shelby Spong

#67. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.

Denise Caruso

#68. They don't want to feed an ISIS narrative that there is a religious war between Islam and the Christian West, plus genocide is carefully defined under international law.

Tom Gjelten

#69. We did not lack for religious leaders to urge us into "godly" war [ ... ]. All of this was part of a well-financed propaganda campaign on the part of British agents. As usual, the government of the United States was being "run" by the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Eustace Mullins

#70. The problem is not religion or God. The actual problem is authoritarianism, mixed with the desire to angrily impose one's personal apparently idealistic beliefs on others.

Abhijit Naskar

#71. Religious war at its simplest is killing each other over who has the best imaginary friend.

Richard Jeni

#72. Were there atheists in foxholes during World War II? Of course, as can be verified by my dogtags . . . A veteran of Omaha Beach in 1944, I insisted upon including 'None' instead of P, C, or J as my religious affiliation.

Warren Allen Smith

#73. [W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.

Jared Diamond

#74. The same means that have supported every other popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#75. People sense that our reaction to phenomena such as epidemics or religious war is not that different to how we reacted to plagues or to battles a millennia ago.

Karen Maitland

#76. It is a grave matter to enter a war, without adequate military preparation; it may prove fatal to come into peace, without moral and religious preparation.

Louis Finkelstein

#77. I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed.

Charles McCarry

#78. Under Lenin the Soviet Union was like a religious revival, under Stalin like a prison, under Khrushchev like a circus, and under Brezhnev like the U.S. Post Office.

Jimmy Carter

#79. In winter I like sprawling novels, full of conflict and intrigue, and during the bleakest, coldest days of December I holed up with Nicola Griffith 's Hild, a book of love and sex and war and religious upheaval, and I recommend it even over the warmest pair of Sorels.

Maud Newton

#80. While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its problems. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.

Sam Harris

#81. People talk about history and things like slavery, genocide, and religious persecution as horrors that happened in the past because we were ignorant. But nothing's changed. We still hate what we don't understand.

J. Matthew Nespoli

#82. Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.

Michael Shaara

#83. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

Hunter S. Thompson

#84. Examples of goodness that know no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documents of war, as they also represent an axis around which a healthy future can be constructed after the atrocities have halted.

Dario Spini

#85. The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

Steven Weinberg

#86. When has religion ever been unifying? Religion has introduced many wars in this world, enough bloodshed and violence.

Elie Wiesel

#87. [In] the national and religious conflict of the [Byzantine and Saracen] empires, peace was without confidence, and war without mercy.

Edward Gibbon

#88. Throughout the ages, Christians have adapted John of Patmos's visions to changing times, reading their own social, political and religious conflicts into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes. Yet his Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear and desires for vengeance but also to hope.

Elaine Pagels

#89. Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.

Denzel Washington

#90. A smile flitted across War's mouth, hidden by her helmet. She had little patience for religion (although she approved heartily of the religious fanatics who sought to cleanse the world of heresy), and the only faith War had was in cold steel and hot blood.

Jackie Morse Kessler

#91. All religious wars are about people arguing over who has the biggest invisible friend.

Yasser Arafat

#92. Submitted to the Sec. of War. On principle I dislike an oath which requires a man to swear he has not done wrong. It rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it is enough if the man does no wrong hereafter.

Abraham Lincoln