There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
Religion is never the problem; it's the people who use it to gain power.
When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.
What an extraordinary thing it can be, love, how it will not defined by gender, by sexuality, by race, by religion, by anything. It's something else. It's something other.
In religion as in politics it so happens that we have less charity for those who believe half our creed, than for those who deny the whole of it.
After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful.
Last week I did a piece for Style on advice to Laura Bush about how to help her husband. This week it's religion. It just depends on what I find interesting at the moment.
Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
As a child, the conversations that I liked to have with my friends - or with anyone, for that matter - were always about religion.
I have long believed that celebrity, the way we worship and package and sell our pop stars, is what filled the need for gods that was once filled by the pictures in stained glass. Hollywood is post-Christian Venice - in other words, a pantheon of saints without the hassle and heartache of religion.
Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.
It's very difficult to talk about religion in Iran because religion has gotten so mixed up with politics.
I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
The songs keep on writing themselves, and I really love them. It's as close as I get to a religion.
Religion is life inspired by Heavenly Love; and life is something fresh and cheerful and vigorous.
The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.
My religion is my most precious possession. Except for it, I could easily have become excessively occupied with industry. Sharing responsibility for church work has been a vital counterbalance in my life.
Religion and politics hit nerves. There's a lot of anger about a lot of things. It's not easily resolved. I guess that's what wars are about. Wars are about prejudice and fear. Hit first before you get hit. Believe me, I know.
Moral values, and a culture and a religion, maintaining these values are far better than laws and regulations.
We must fix our broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.
The Islamic tradition does show some areas of apparent incompatibility with the goals of women in the West, and Muslims have a long way to go in their attitudes towards women. But blaming the religion is again to express an ignorance both of the religion and of the historical struggle for equality of women in Muslim societies.
Politicians don't really bring up religion in England.
Vilification on the grounds of race or religion is always wrong. There's no place for inciting hatred within our Australia society.
I have never made fun of religion. Religion is something I don't even want to mess with, because I am really afraid of the clouds opening up and my being struck by lightning.
I believe in, and will to the best of my ability fight for, equal rights and freedom of opinion for everyone, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, orientation - you know the rest.
I think science is about the search for God; it just comes at it from a different angle than religion.
IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.
Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles.
It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.
I would like to reconcile the church and the circus. I wanted to transform the theatre... to get my message across that there is only one God - the living man - the person sitting next to you. That is my religion. I believe that there is a sense to life.
It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
The best religion is the most tolerant.
Religion is supposed to be a positive thing when you look at the true religions around the world, not the fundamentalists. You always have to go with what your spirit tells you, not what people advise you. I'm a man that will always follow my own path.
It doesn't matter what tradition you come from, what religion you have or don't, what culture you were brought up in or what God you ascribe to: Faith is worthwhile as it helps us to be kinder, more generous, more loving and forgiving people.
