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

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.

The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.

Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.

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

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.

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

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.

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

One religion is as true as another.

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