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.

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.

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.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.

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.

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

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

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.

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