The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

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

So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.

The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious, which is the endowment of persons as individuals, is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.

The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

I can’t see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion. To me they’re the same thing.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.