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"One should not stand at the foot of a sick person's bed, because that place is reserved for the guardian angel."
-Jewish Folk Saying
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I acknowledge myself a unitarian—Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father ... There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses, that three is one, and one three.
-Abigail Adams, In a letter to John Quincy Adams, May 5, 1816
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The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.
-John Adams
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The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.
-Thomas Aquinas
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As a man can drink water from any side of a full tank, so the skilled theologian can wrest from any scripture that which will serve his purpose.
-Bhagavad Gita
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"The Lord is my light, and my salvation; whom shall I fear?"
-Bible, Psalm 27: 1
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Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
-Lenny Bruce
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Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all -- that has been my religion.
-John Burroughs
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The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
-Sir Richard Francis Burton
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When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.
-Fidel Castro, "The Economist", August 27, 1997
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Anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can’t hate black people anymore, of course, and you can’t hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.
-Tom Clancy, Interview, "Time", July 29, 2002
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The church has been brought into the same value system as the world: fame, success, materialism and celebrity. We watch the leading churches and the leading Christians for our cues. We want to emulate the best known preachers with the biggest sanctuaries and the grandest edifices. Preoccupation with these values has perverted the church's message.
-Chuck Colson, Loving God
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Strife -- in philosophy, religion, and politics -- has certainly gained so much ground that it is impossible for us to reconcile with one another. But it is possible to find reconciliation ... by means of the foundation of all things, which is God. For he does not cease to be the same for all ... irrespective of our differences, and his earth bears us all, even if we preferred to see that the ground would cleave asunder beneath our enemies.
The sun sends his rays upon us directly, paying no heed that we look askance at one another. The rose smells sweetly to both the Jew and the Christian -- and to the Muslim too. And so God is God of all, and whatever he says, he says in the same manner to all that are ready to listen. If then we look to our own rules, books, and works, which we have made ourselves and which differ in many thousands of ways, we are irreconcilable. But if with due attention and honor we accept God's ideas regarding our lives ... reconciliation is easy.
-Jan Amos Comenius, A Perfect Reformation
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And I myself a Catholic will be,
So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee.
Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow
On us, the Poets militant below.
-Abraham Cowley, On the Death of Mr Crashaw
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"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."
-Dalai Lama
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My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.
-Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain, 2004
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Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.
-Richard Dawkins
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The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.
-John Dewey
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What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.
-Albert Einstein
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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
-Albert Einstein
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To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.
-Albert Einstein
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The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish... For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything chosen about them.
-Albert Einstein, letter to Eric Gutkind, January 3, 1954
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"The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship."
-Sophia Lyon Fahs, Today's Children and Yesterday's Heritage, from Cornerstones, p.5.
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And you, systematic Utopians, who make an abstraction of human nature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds, emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the simian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied: you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be the high-priests of an abominable future!
-Comte de Falloux
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She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in the process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, bk. 1, ch. 1 (1920), said of Beatrice Blaine.
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"Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand."
-Frederick the Great
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"Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is IT goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found."
"Medieval theologians even described God, in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end."
-Robert Fulghum, All I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
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"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo Galilei
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Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
-Bill Gates, Time Magazine, January 13, 1996
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"I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit."
-Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet"
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"Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife."
-Kahlil Gibran, "Beauty"
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"If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul."
-Kahlil Gibran, "A Handful of Sand on the Shore"
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One and all, religions have their original prophets, their sacred books, their traditions of ages gone. One and all require us to accept without question what other people long dead have said or written; to obey without question the commands of those behind us.... No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, "This is our best thought, go on, think farther!" then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, His Religion and Hers, pp. 188-90, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, ed., Women Without Superstition, p. 341, 1923
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On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism'.
-Barry Goldwater
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History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
-Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1972
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All...religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.
-Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.
-Mark Hopkins
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Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
-Henrik Ibsen, letter to Georg Brandes, quoted in "Ibsen" by biographer Aall, 1906
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"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
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I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, not from our words, that our religion must be judged.
-Thomas Jefferson, (letter to Mrs. H. Harrison Smith, 1816)
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I have had but one passion, and I have lived for it - the absorbingly arduous yet glorious work of proclaiming the grace and love of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
-John Henry Jowett
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You may have noticed that many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious purposes, of course—to know more about iniquity than the Unregenerate.
-Rudyard Kipling, "Watches of the Night" in Plain Tales from the Hills
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You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to perfect your soul; I have found saintliness in avowed atheists.
-Rabbi Harold Kushner, The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-Third Psalm, "http://www.beliefnet.com/story/132/story_13209_1.html"
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"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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And she (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay
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I have to be honest with you. Islam is on very thin ice with me....Through our screaming self-pity and our conspicuous silences, we Muslims are conspiring against ourselves. We're in crisis and we're dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?
-Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam : A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, 2003
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Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
-Karl Marx, Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
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"I still say a church steeple with a lightening rod on top shows a lack of confidence."
-Doug McLeod
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All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy. …
… For religion is the greatest inspirer of hatred the world has ever seen, and it shows no sign of losing that character in its old age. Every effort to make the warring sects lie down together has failed. They quarrel incessantly, and they will keep on quarreling to the end of the chapter.
http://www.mencken.org/text/txt001/elliott.leo.1998.mencken-01.htm
-H. L. Mencken, The Impending Combat, May 28, 1928
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The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.
-H. L. Mencken, Minority Report, H. L. Mencken's Notebooks, Knopf, 1956 [300]
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We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
-H. L. Mencken
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It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries.
-Karl Menninger, Man Against Himself, 1938
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I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized, on this earth, capable of becoming true man, 'master of his fate and captain of his soul'.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
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"The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies."
-Reinhold Niebuhr, Interpretation of Christian Ethics, p. 8, 1935
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I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
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.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason1.htm
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part First, Section 1
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"Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known."
-Blaise Pascal
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Fanatical religion driven to a certain point is almost as bad as none at all, but not quite.
-Will Rogers
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Do anything in this world but monkey with somebody eles's religion. What reasoning of conceit makes anyone think theirs is right?
-Will Rogers
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"A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge."
-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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No religion can be built on force.
-George Sand
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The world could not long ignore a holy church. The church is not despised because it is holy: it is despised because it is not holy enough. There is not enough difference between the people inside the church and those outside to be impressive. A church in which saints were as common as now they are rare would convict the world, if only by contrast. Sanctity cannot be ignored. Even a little bit is potent. So far from the gates of hell prevailing against it, it hammers on their triple steel.
-W.E. (William Edwin) Sangster, The Call to Be Saints
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Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
-William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene 1 (Shylock speaking), 1596
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"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
-William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
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Look into the world — how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man’s affliction, taking shelter behind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear.
-Laurence Sterne, Sermons [sermon 3, Philanthropy recommended] ed. Melvyn New, University Press of Florida (1996), 1760
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We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
http://www.readbookonline.net/books/Swift/136/
-Jonathan Swift, essay "Thoughts on various subjects"
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I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
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"We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened."
-Mark Twain
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Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.
-Mark Twain
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"Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy."
-Franz Werfel
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"... And God, who studies each separate soul, out of commonplace lives makes his beautiful whole."
-Sarah Chauncey Woolsey
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A good man, is a good man, whether in this church, or out of it.
-Brigham Young
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Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears. Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy its glories.
-Brigham Young
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"A God all mercy is a God unjust."
-Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night iv. Line 233.
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"Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion. "
-Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto [Book II, Chapter 16]
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Books about Religion
