To me, ideology is corrupt; it’s a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you’re an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you’re religious, there’s a mystery left there.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

Theology is unnecessary.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Religion is just mind control.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

‚Your Erroneous Zones’ was the book that went over the top simply because I believed in it so much.

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.

God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

Faith never makes a confession.

I believe in being an innovator.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Religion was instituted to make us happy in this life and in the other. What must we do to be happy in the life to come? Be just.

I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.

In this world filled with challenges, we do need help from time to time. Religion, eternal truth, and our missionaries are vital parts of that help.

The most powerful idea that’s entered the world in the last few thousand years – the idea of grace – is the reason I would like to be a Christian.

In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

I’m not sure what you need first – the players believing or others believing in them – but in the end, both have to think it.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.

I do not think I should care to go on worshipping a Madonna even if she did wink. One cannot make much out of a wink. We want something more than that from the object of our adoration.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

The gospel to me is simply irresistible.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

If Christ has died for me, ungodly as I am, without strength as I am, then I cannot live in sin any longer, but must arouse myself to love and serve Him who has redeemed me.

Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology – absolutely.

God always wants us to be growing.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

There are many, many Christians who practice Buddhism, and they become better and better Christians all the time.

I’m conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.

It’s always interesting about God because it’s like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

Was Jesus the son of God? Yes. But so are you. You just haven’t realized it yet.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.