If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens you can never regain their respect and esteem.

When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society and cast off all regard to religion their case is much to be pitied.

Nations are equal in respect to each other and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength or however greatly they may differ in government religion or manners.

The fundamentalists are increasing. People afraid to oppose those fundamentalists shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion which is the source of fundamentalism.

There is no religion without love and people may talk as much as they like about their religion but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast it is all a sham.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

Basically fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

To have dominion by religion is to have dominion over men's souls thus over their very spiritual life and to use the Divine things which are in their religion as the means.

I travel around the world experiencing every language every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile because their lives are so difficult.

The Muslims have as everyone else says the right to practice their religion and they have the right to construct a mosque at ground zero if they wish. What I am saying though is that they should listen to public opinion they should listen to the deep wounds and anguish that this is causing to so many good people.

God expects from men something more than at such times and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

All the different nations in the world despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life still have one thing in common and that is what's inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings we wouldn't be able to tell from those X-rays what the person's language or background or race is.

There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.

I know one thing: There are a billion Islamic people in the world today and there will be about 2 billion by the time we're dead. They're not going to give up their religion.

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so.

I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience no matter what religion or color of their skin or situation in life.

Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.

Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.

It is then by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy that we can by checking them as we go along and comparing them trace out finally the body that produced them.

My political ideas and things like that even my religion I try to keep close to me because it's a personal thing and I don't shove it down people's throats. I don't condemn any artist that wants to do that like the Baldwins. That's their choice. But in my world I'm just an entertainer.