religion

"If money’s the god people worship, I’d rather go worship the devil instead."

"So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"

"The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank."

"Not bad, not bad at all,"Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."

"You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just . . . is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors."

"Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else..."

"The story of my family. . .changes with the teller."

"The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit."

"I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for."

"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever."

"National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same."

"To err is human, to forgive, divine."

"Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic."

"A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him."

"The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it."

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage"

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."

"Don't they get afraid, then?""They have a religion for that."

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain."