Religious Wars Quotes

• We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.

  Karl Popper

  Love, Religious, War

  Karl Popper (2014). “Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge”, p.479, Routledge

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• The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Religious, War, Native American

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “Religion”, p.55, Arthur Schopenhauer

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• Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.

  Roger Ebert

  Religious, War, Paris

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• 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.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Religious, War, Reality

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• Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Religious, War, Religion

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• I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I dont believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; its from another century, its not for today.

  Alejandro Jodorowsky

  Religious, War, Believe

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

  Al Gore

  Religious, War, Evil

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• Prior to and during [John] Locke's time, it was difficult to determine where religion or church left off and government or state began. The powers of both were often combined. As a result, churches frequently used the force of the state to promote and enforce their interests and doctrines. This caused horrendous atrocities against Jews and heretics, as well as the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

  Jayne Meadows

  Religious, War, Government

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• All religious wars are about people arguing over who has the biggest invisible friend.

  Yasser Arafat

  Religious, War, People

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• The religious wars showed that the Christian faith was no longer Europe's unifying force. A new common ground was needed, and it was found in reason, which is something that is shared by all of mankind. This was one of the roots of the Enlightenment and its concept of universal human rights.

  Walter Kasper

  Christian, Religious, War

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.

  Jack Vance

  Religious, War, Race

  "The Face". Book by Jack Vance, 1979.

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• The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror.

  Melanie Phillips

  Religious, War, Israel

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• Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility.

  Mahathir Mohamad

  Christian, Religious, Real

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• Christianity...made, for nearly 1,500 years, persecution, religious wars, massacres, theological feuds and bloodshed, heresy huntings and heretic burnings, prisons, dungeons, anathemas, curses, opposition to science, hatred of liberty, spiritual bondage, the life without love or laughter.

  M. M. Mangasarian

  Spiritual, Religious, Laughter

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• If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had endangered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity.

  A.J. Ayer

  Religious, Children, War

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• 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.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, War, Hatred

  "Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, www.theguardian.com. January 8, 2008.

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• If there ever was a religious war full of terror, it was the Crusades. But you can't blame Christianity because a few adventurers did this.

  Moustapha Akkad

  Religious, War, Messages

  "The pitfalls of filming Muhammad" by Shahed Amanullah, www.theguardian.com. November 4, 2009.

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• I'm right-handed, whereas the fellow in my mirror is left-handed. I start shaving from the left; he starts from the right. Differences only in perception, but religious wars have been fought over such.

  Robert Breault

  Religious, War, Mirrors

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• [The war on terrorism isn't a religious war, but] a defense of our right to make moral choices, to seek fellowship with God that is chosen and not commanded.

  John Ashcroft

  Religious, War, Choices

  "The gospel according to John (Ashcroft)" by Rob Morse, www.sfgate.com. February 22, 2002.

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• By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars.

  Barry Goldwater

  Religious, War, Years

  Remarks in the Congressional Record, www.nytimes.com. September 15, 1981.

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• [Pope Francis] most recent trip was to Sweden, where he commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. That had triggered one of the biggest splits in Christianity and decades of religious wars. He went so far as to praise Luther, who was once considered a heretic in the church, as a great reformer. So what he's been doing with other Christian churches is trying to heal past wounds and work together toward a shared view of their history.

  Sylvia Poggioli

  Christian, Religious, War

  Source: www.npr.org

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• We have a war on women, race wars. Income wars, age wars, religious wars, anything you can imagine. A house divided against itself cannot stand it. And it's going to be up to us, to people, to begin the focus on the positive things, on the things that we have in common and stop listening to those who are stoking the fires of division.

  Benjamin Carson

  Religious, War, Fire

  "Ben Carson calls for unity as Charleston community recovers from tragedy". "The Kelly File" with Megyn Kelly, www.foxnews.com. June 18, 2015.

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• You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world.

  Bertrand Russell

  Christian, War, Race

  Bertrand Russell, Robert Edward Egner (1961). “The basic writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959”

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• All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, War, Religion

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• All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

  Umberto Eco

  Religious, War, Blood

  "The roots of conflict" by Umberto Eco, www.theguardian.com. October 13, 2001.

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