Top 1200 Religious History Quotes & Sayings

All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones. I never agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups.

The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

If you go back far enough and get a wider enough picture of history, we have let go of many things that follow a religious narrative. We don't burn witches anymore. Most people would consider that barbaric. We don't sacrifice human beings, which was a religious act practiced by numerous cultures on this planet.

For 179 years [The Book of Mormon] has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other religious history – perhaps like no other book in any religious history- and still, it stands.

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity - I admire wise men. Some of my favorite forms of history are religious history, what the sages say from the top of the mountain and how they view life.

I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to this great constitutional principle which is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution: the principle of religious independence, of religious liberty, of religious freedom.

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

The religious foundations of America have been completely expurgated from our history textbooks.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.

Everyone talks about religious liberty, but no one believes it. So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

No, I'm not religious, I'm sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again. There is no time now to be religious." "No time. Does it need time to be religious?" "Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can't be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.

The very fears and guilts imposed by religious training are responsible for some of history's most brutal wars, crusades, pogroms, and persecutions, including five centuries of almost unimaginable terrorism under Europe's Inquisition and the unthinkably sadistic legal murder of nearly nine million women. History doesn't say much very good about God.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

You cannot take one set of issues from one country and apply it to another. They are all different, in terms of history, and the religious compositions of the populations involved.

Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race.

I am aware that I preach a religious doctrine understood and accepted by a very small part of the religious world, when I point out the relation of the religious concept to physical fitness.

When the Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis in 1944 we passed the War Refugee Act, which focused on rescuing Jews, a religious group. But if the religious group is the subject of the persecution based on their religion, it's perfectly OK for a First Amendment-bound society to emphasize their rescue, just as it is perfectly OK to emphasize the fact that many, if not all of the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, come from countries with a history of supporting terrorism.

Christian Science has been enormously influential in our religious history, and the church is very powerful. It has won an extraordinary number of legal battles in this country. It has succeeded in passing a number of what are called 'religious exemption laws.'

What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.

The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.

Tolerance is a good cornerstone on which to build human relationships. When one views the slaughter and suffering caused by religious intolerance throughout all the history of man and into modern times, one can see that intolerance is a very nonsurvival activity. Religious tolerance does not mean one cannot express his own beliefs. It does mean that seeking to undermine or attack the religious faith and beliefs of another has always been a short road to trouble .

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

Wherever there is a religious regime, over there there is ignorance, misery and absurdity! No religious state can ever elevate its own people! Sooner or later, the primitiveness of the religious administrations and the irrationality of the religious rules will cause a great collapse of those countries! The downfall is inevitable!

I'm very religious, you know. Now, OK, if by 'religious', you mean that I go to church every Sunday, read the bible faithfully, and I listen to Debbie Boone, umm, I'm not religious in that sense... But if by 'religious' you mean that I love others and try to help them whenever possible... Again, no. But if by 'religious' you mean that I like to eat coleslaw... Yeah, OK, OK!

Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.

There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other external; religious control and political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of [external, i.e., political control] falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If civilized man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense.

Government sponsorship of religious activity, including prayer services, sacred symbols, religious festivals, and the like, tends to secularize the religious activity rather than make government more ethical or religious.

Mythology and history are my passion. I grew up in a religious family and learnt about our scriptures and philosophies. It's the language I'm comfortable with.

I grew up in a very religious family, so that was never going to leave me. I just accepted it over the years. Although I'm not religious myself, it is so much a part of me. It's a part of my history, a part of my tradition and my culture, so I don't want to just throw it away and leave it behind, because it's made me who I am today.

I think that Mary Baker Eddy was a fascinating character in American religious history.

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made.

I live in a country where 90 or 95 percent of the people profess to be religious, and maybe they are religious, though my experience of religion suggests that very few people are actually religious in more than a conventional sense.

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

Every religious group, while perhaps a majority somewhere, is also inevitably a minority somewhere else. Thus, religious organizations should and do show tolerance toward members of other religious denominations.

In the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of culture in a people. It was not until the Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more tolerant, and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that they declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture.

We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world, void of national bias, race, hate, and religious prejudice. There should be no indulgence in undue eulogy of the Negro. The case of the Negro is well taken care of when it is shown how he has far influenced the development of civilization.

The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.

It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.

Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system.

rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.

Though I'm not religious, I am interested in religion. I read a lot of history and I think it came out of that. I just think I couldn't understand certain eras of history without knowing what these people believed in.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

Throughout history, religious wars have always been the most brutal and cruel and merciless.

I love history, cultural and religious studies, philosophy, photography and traveling.

There is not a truth to be gathered from history more certain, or more momentous, than this: that civil liberty cannot long be separated from religious liberty without danger, and ultimately without destruction to both. Wherever religious liberty exists, it will, first or last, bring in and establish political liberty.

Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.

Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.

If you look throughout human history ... the central epiphany of every religious tradition always occurs in the wilderness.