Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
‐‐ James Madison
Religious celebrations, and the good will, high spirits and generosity that mark them, are wonderful occasions for understanding the potential of 'everyday multiculturalism', and how people from diverse faiths can connect and show they care, rather than go down parallel, sometimes hostile, roads.
‐‐ Randa Abdel-Fattah
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
‐‐ Michael Shermer
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.
‐‐ Richard Dawkins
Religious freedom is already protected in the United States. It's in our Constitution. It's in most state constitutions.
‐‐ Dannel Malloy
Religious freedom is too sacred a right to be restricted or prohibited in any degree without convincing proof that a legitimate interest of the state is in grave danger.
‐‐ Frank Murphy
Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.
‐‐ Frank Wolf
Religious freedom opens a door for Americans that is closed to too many others around the world. But whether we walk through that door, and what we do with our lives after we do, is up to us.
‐‐ Mitt Romney
Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.
‐‐ Taslima Nasrin
Religious humor is not really my area, so I probably wouldn't do anything about that, or politics or something.
‐‐ Chris Lilley
Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.
‐‐ Sam Harris
Religious institutions should have religious freedom on this issue. No church or minister should ever have to conduct a marriage that is inconsistent with their religious beliefs. But I think as a civil institution, this issue's time has come and we need to move forward.
‐‐ Kay Hagan
Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas.
‐‐ Lawrence M. Krauss
Religious liberty doesn't include encouraging a fellow American to engage in violent jihad and kill an American here. That is not protected free speech. That is not protected religious belief.
‐‐ George Pataki
Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution. And whether the cause is justice for the persecuted, compassion for the needy and the sick, or mercy for the child waiting to be born, there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action.
‐‐ Mitt Romney
Religious-liberty protections are one way of achieving civil peace even amid disagreement. The United States is a pluralistic society. To protect that pluralism and the rights of all Americans, of whatever faith they may practice, religious-liberty laws are good policy. Liberals committed to tolerance should embrace them.
‐‐ Edwin Meese
Religious liberty should be a bipartisan issue.
‐‐ Ted Cruz
Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.
‐‐ Mother Angelica
Religious minority communities in India have endured incidents of harassment, discrimination, intimidation and violent attacks for decades, often with little hope for justice.
‐‐ Trent Franks
Religious or biblical can sometimes be a little soft, but 'A.D.' doesn't shy away from the violence of the time, the political intrigue. The story is really about the resurrection of faith, which is how the disciples went about keeping the word of Christ. So, they found all kinds of trouble and problems and torture and persecution.
‐‐ Juan Pablo Di Pace
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
‐‐ Richard Dawkins
Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.
‐‐ Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Religious people are happier.
‐‐ Deborah Norville
Religious people are simply following major core practices of happy people. For example, one benefits from the guaranteed social support that can be found in a church, synagogue, or mosque.
‐‐ Karen Salmansohn
Religious people... hold a kind and merciful view of life, the faith of the broken, the hounded, the hopeless. Yet too often, they will not extend that spirit to our fellow creatures.
‐‐ Matthew Scully
Religious people know deep down that that is the most vulnerable area of their lives, and when others question it, they are liable to hit out and feel insulted. You know it is absolutely without proof, yet people still commit themselves totally to this belief. They cannot refute it because it is so central to their lives.
‐‐ John Hurt
Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.
‐‐ Karen Armstrong
Religious people today are courts and juries. When it comes down to it, Jesus died on the cross so that we could learn to love others like we love ourselves, not judge them or persecute them.
‐‐ Tammy Faye Bakker
Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
‐‐ Edmund Burke
Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.
‐‐ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action.
‐‐ Emile Durkheim
Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo
Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo
Religious relativism is not the answer to disagreement between faiths; yet relativism, and a blurring of religious distinctions, all too often result when two deeply believing faith communities engage each other in the public arena on theological issues.
‐‐ Meir Soloveichik
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
‐‐ Emile Durkheim
Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.
‐‐ Jonathan Sacks
Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.
‐‐ Amy Waldman
Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.
‐‐ John Desmond Bernal
Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret - these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.
‐‐ Tariq Ramadan
Religious traditions are easy to lose sight of in today's marketing frenzy. Make sure you take time to gently usher your little ones into the rituals that have special meaning for you.
‐‐ Adam Mansbach
Religious traditions are in a constant state of development and renewed self-understanding.
‐‐ David Novak
Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.
‐‐ Charles de Secondat
Religious work is one of the best ways to keep from facing your reality if you are Christian, if you are using it to calm the pain, because that it what all addictions are, attempts to cover the pain of this spiritual disease.
‐‐ Keith Miller
Religiously the Empire was pluralistic and marked by a search for a faith which would be satisfying intellectually and ethically and would give assurance of immortality.
‐‐ Kenneth Scott Latourette
Relinquishing apparent national sovereignty does not have to entail a loss of national sovereignty, but can actually be a benefit.
‐‐ Ulrich Beck
Relish everything that's inside of you, the imperfections, the darkness, the richness and light and everything. And that makes for a full life.
‐‐ Anthony Hopkins
Reluctant as I am to regard myself as a style icon, I would love to think I could inspire older women to make the most of themselves.
‐‐ Mary Berry
'Reluctantly Healthy' is so completely different than what I do for a living. It's really what I wanted it to be, which is learning to be healthy.
‐‐ Judy Greer
Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.
‐‐ Michael Ignatieff