Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them.

One religion is as true as another.

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.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Educate people without religion and you make them but clever devils.

Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.

The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.

An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.

I can’t see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion. To me they’re the same thing.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.