Religion
Collected by Jon Winokur

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
— LENNY BRUCE

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
— OSCAR WILDE

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
—_ALDOUS HUXLEY

Man is the only animal that has the true religion -several of them.
— MARK TWAIN

Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.
—H. L. MENCKEN
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Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
—~NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,0.00 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
— H. L. MENCKEN

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were, of course, exterminated.
— VOLTAIRE

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
— JOHN MORLEY

A church is a place where clergymen who have never been to heaven preach about it to people who will never get there.
— H. L. MENCKEN

Don’t stay away from church because there are so many hypocrites. There’s always room for one more.
— A. R. ADAMS

America has become so tense and nervous, it’s been years since I’ve seen anyone sleep in church.
— NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up —they have no holidays.
— HENNY YOUNGMAN

Thank God I’m an atheist.
—LUIS BUÑUEL
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Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single practitioner confessedly unworthy.
— AMBROSE BIERCE

If you want to make a man angry, tell him you are going to pray for him.
— EDGAR HOWE

I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.
— ORSON WELLES

Vouchsafe 0 Lord, to keep us this day without being found out.
— SAMUEL BUTLER
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Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
— MARK TWAIN

A casual stroll through lunatic asylums shows that faith does not prove anything.
— NIETZSCHE

Perhaps the most lasting pleasure in life is that of not going to church.
— WILLIAM INGE

A Calvinistic Presbyterian believes that all Catholics will be damned because they are predestined to be damned; an ordinary Presbyterian believes that all Catholics will be damned on their merits.
— JOHN BARTLEY

I was raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on a Saturday night and, most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on a Saturday night.
— WOODY ALLEN

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived in the United States in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under the English law at that time.
— GARRISON KEILLOR