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

“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”

“Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.”

“Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".”

“A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.”

“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”