Religious Quotes - Page 261

[T]he central problem of government is a religious one; and anyone who assumes that he can form his political beliefs without consulting his ethics, which have their basis in religious conviction, is deceiving himself either about the true nature of government or his moral responsibility for his actions

I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.

The first religious experience that I can remember is getting under the nursery table to pray that the dancing mistress might be dead before we got to the Dancing Class.

I find that those who voted for George W. Bush are less offended by his religious references, and those who voted for Bill Clinton did not seem offended at all when people prayed at his inauguration.

The angels started singing, the clouds parted, it was a religious experience. I've never had the same reaction to a product, not in 25 years.

Gay marriage is the last bastion of, to me... as a legal, ceremonial, sentimental and religious side, it's one of the last steps. Retaining your job being one of the earlier steps, like, not getting kicked out of your job because you're gay.

In general, religious people seem to be happier than non-religious people - under various definitions of "religiosity," such as church attendance or professed spiritual beliefs.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.

According to UNESCO: there are over 154 million children in the world deprived of education due to poverty, slavery, racism, religious extremism, gender discrimination, and geographical isolation. The cost to educate a child in the third world is about $ 1 per month per child. To achieve global literacy, the investment would be $ 8 billion per year for 15 years.

I've had two fatwas issued against me by despot mullahs opposed to education - and important to know that the great majority of Imams and Islamic religious leaders support education for all children.

I am not the least bit religious, but at least I stick up for the good work of religion and the cascade of benefits that come from religion.

One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.

Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

Whenever you're in a natural system and you're making sound, you are putting yourself at risk. As you go up the evolutionary ladder, from insects to frogs to birds and on up into mammals, the higher intelligence recognizes that when you vocalize, you put yourself at risk. So mammals generally vocalize or make noise much more rarely than, let's say, insects or frogs. And when they do, and put themselves at risk, it has to be worth the risk, and have true meaning, such as signaling during a hunting party, calling in prey, some religious or spiritual ceremony, something like that.

Among the Jews, especially in the Old Testament, teachings served not for the communication of religious truth, but rather to bring the one taught into direct confrontation with the Divine Will.

I want to know where joy lives. I'd interview scientists, religious leaders and heads of state. I'd want to find out exactly what makes people happy. I'd want to look into the biology, the chemistry of the human brain.

The women's movement and gay and lesbian movements always come together, and our adversaries are always the same because the male supremacist, patriarchal, ultra-right-wing, religious fundamentalists, whatever you want to call it is devoted to saying that sex is only moral and okay when it is directed towards having children and occurs in patriarchal marriage, so the children are owned.

I'm more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don't feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I've felt pressure when reporters asked me, "Do you believe in God?" I do say, "No. I believe in people."

I grew up with a house full of dogs. My mother was a great nature lover and taught us to have almost a religious sense of respect for the natural world.

The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?

Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.

Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.