Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.

When religion abandons poetic utterance, it cuts its own throat.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

A civil sword (as woeful experience in all ages has proved) is so far from bringing or helping forward an opposite in religion to repentance that magistrates sin grievously against the work of God and blood of souls by such proceedings... Religion cannot be true which needs such instruments of violence to uphold it so.

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial - at once full of hope and full of fear - of the vastitude of human ignorance.

religions are merely the garments of faith — and very ill cut they often are,

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still being besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?

Religion is like drugs, it destroys the thinking mind.

Religion suppresses curiosity.

People having religions is an insult to the universe.

Over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice.

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.