God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

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

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

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.

Without doubt God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. He directs angels, man, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things—but each according to its nature—and man having been created free, he is freely led. This rule is truly the eternal law and in it we must believe.

The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious, which is the endowment of persons as individuals, is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.

The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

Whatsoever is, is in God.

Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company.

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

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

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