A Quote by Sigmund Freud

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

Sigmund Freud

Quote Topics

Found Immorality Less Morality Religion Support Than Times

Quote Author

Sigmund Freud
Austrian - Psychologist
May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939

In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has. If the achievements of religion in respect to man's happiness, susceptibility to culture and moral control are no better than this, the question cannot but arise whether we are not overrating its necessity for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing our cultural demands upon it.

Sigmund Freud

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.

Arthur C. Clarke

We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism.

George W. Romney

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

Henry Ward Beecher

There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality . All else is immorality.

Theodore Roosevelt

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

D. H. Lawrence

Everywhere the tendency has been to separate religion from morality, to set them in opposition even. But a religion without morality is a superstition and a curse; and anything like an adequate and complete morality without religion is impossible. The only salvation for man is in the union of the two as Christianity unites them.

Mark Hopkins

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.

Penn Jillette

See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality,--that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off all sproutings, all wild luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core.

Nathaniel Culverwell

People who practise a religion have been found to be happier, healthier and less stressed than those who don't.

Harold George Koenig

Religion gets its morality from us. We don't get our morality from religion.

Christopher Hitchens

Whatever efforts one may make, one must revert to the realization that religion is the real basis of morality; religion is the real and perceptible purpose within us, which alone, can turn aside our attention from things. ... The science of morality can no more teach human beings to be honest, in all the magnificence of this word, than geometry can teach one how to draw.