Tourism is a very big economic benefit to the Sherpa people, and also, they have very strong ties to their own social attitudes and their own religion, so fortunately, they’re not too influenced by many of our Western attitudes.

I did once seriously think of embracing the Christian faith. The gentle figure of Christ, so full of forgiveness that he taught his followers not to retaliate when abused or struck, but to turn the other cheek – I thought it was a beautiful example of the perfect man.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.

You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

I believe in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

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

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

My message is that God is a good God.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

The reason why I wear gold – I wear gold for three reasons. One, when Jesus was born, three wise men came from the east: one brought frankincense, one brought myrrh, the other one brought gold. The second reason I wear gold is I can afford it. The third reason I wear it, it’s symbolic of my African heritage.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

Conversion is not my intention. Changing religion is not easy. You may develop some kind of confusion or difficulties.

Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews – everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

I’m a Christian by choice.

I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

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

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

When you become a Christian, something truly amazing happens: God comes to live inside your heart. You become the home of God.

The gods‘ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

I’m an atheist.

Every child that isn’t born, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, has the face of the Lord.

Being brought up very religious, I have a fear of people that look to idol gods.

Hate has no place in the house of God.

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

I am a Catholic because I choose to be a Catholic. And then I go to the Mass because I choose. It is out of my free will.

I didn’t want to submit to the army and then, on the day of judgment, have God say to me, ‚Why did you do that?‘ This life is a trial, and you realize that what you do is going to be written down for Judgment Day.

I don’t think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.