A Quote by Kerry Thornley

If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.

Kerry Thornley

Quote Topics

Disorganized Fringe Lunatic Marijuana Masses Opium Organized Organized Religion Religion Then

Quote Author

Kerry Thornley
American - Philosopher
April 17, 1938 - November 28, 1998

In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."

Kurt Vonnegut

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Karl Marx

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

Tom Robbins

Religion is the opium of the people translated from the German Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkessometimes misquoted as opiate of the people.

Karl Marx

Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.

Gideon Defoe

In Russia religion is the opium of the people; in China opium is the religion of the people.

Edgar Snow

Organized religion has a part in the evolution of personal religion. It is the material upon which personal religion is grafted, but the process of grafting must be individual. Every human soul must, through thought, prayer, and study, cultivate his [sic] own religion to suit himself.

Lily Montagu

I cannot mislead people into believing that I support organized religion. In Jesus' name, I cannot be complicit with many of the things organized religion does.

Anne Rice

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Religion is the cause of all the problems in the world. I don’t believe in organized religion at all. It’s what separates people. One religion just represents fragments, it causes war. More people have died because of religious conflict than any other reason.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.

Czeslaw Milosz

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"—cannot hear the music of the spheres.

Albert Einstein

Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.

Elbert Hubbard

I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality.

Dave Davies

Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.