Some Quotations on Religion

Some Quotations on Religion

President George Washington - "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

President Thomas Jefferson - "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."

President James Madison - "In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

President Abraham Lincoln - "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession."

President William Howard Taft - "I do not believe in the divinity of Christ and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

President Theodore Roosevelt - "I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be nonsectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools."

Benjamin Franklin - "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible."

Francis Bacon – "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men."

Mary Wollstonecraft – ". . . the being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason."

Thomas Edison - "Religion is all bunk. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."

Voltaire - "Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror."

Thomas Paine - "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

Elizabeth Cady-Stanton - "The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion."

Mark Twain - "I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force."

Bertrand Russell - "So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

Susan B. Anthony - "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Clarence Darrow – "I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose."

H. L. Mencken – "Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."

Simone de Beauvoir – "I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe."

Isaac Asimov – "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

Gloria Steinem – "It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous."

Douglas Adams – "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"