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.

Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst thing you could say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death.

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.

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

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

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

Educate people without religion and you make them but clever devils.

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.

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.

Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.

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

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