2411) Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary (1911) [CQ]

2412) All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will.

Alexander Herzen
From the Other Shore (1855) [CQ]

2413) To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

Eric Hoffer
The Passionate State of Mind (1955) [CQ]

2414) You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of religion. [...] Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley
"Amor Fati" in
Texts and Pretexts (1932) [CQ]

2415) There is noting more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

Suzanne Lafolette
"The Beginnings of Emancipation" in
Concerning Women (1926) [CQ]

2416) All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Thomas Paine
The Age of Reason (1794) [CQ]

2417) The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

Salman Rushdie
"Is Nothing Sacred?" (lecture) (2/6/1990) [CQ]

2418) The main business of religions is to purify, control and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1840) [CQ]

2419) I cannot see how any man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (c.1888) [CQ]

2420) Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

Oscar Wilde
"Phrases and Prophecies for the Use of the Young" in
Chameleon (12/1894)

[Note: cf. #1038 Feibleman]

2421) Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

Edmund Burke
"Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians" in
The Works (1812)

2422) If you want to make a million [...] the quickest way is to start your own religion.

L. Ron Hubbard
speech to the Eastern Science Fiction Assoc. (1947)
quoted in L. Ron Hubbard (1987)
by B. Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. [ODQ]

2423) To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a cult.

Dean Inge
Outspoken Essays (1920) [WHO]

2424) The religion of one seems madness unto another.

Sir Thomas Browne
Hydriotaphia (1658) [MAC]

2425) There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed: to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own.

C.C. Colton
Lacon (1820) [MAC]

2426) A religious system is an assemblage of guesses.

anonymous
Meditations on Wall Street (1940) [MAC]

2427) Religion has brought forth criminal and impious deeds. [...] How many evils has religion caused.

Lucretius
De Rerum Natura (c. 45 BC) [MAC]

2428) Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal
Pensees (c. 1660) [MAC]

2429) The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.

Napoleon Bonaparte
to Gaspar Gourgaud (1/28/1817) [MAC]

2430) The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

Voltaire
Philosophical Dictionary (1764) [MAC]