If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens you can never regain their respect and esteem.
When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society and cast off all regard to religion their case is much to be pitied.
Nations are equal in respect to each other and entitled to claim equal consideration for their rights whatever may be their relative dimensions or strength or however greatly they may differ in government religion or manners.
The fundamentalists are increasing. People afraid to oppose those fundamentalists shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion which is the source of fundamentalism.
There is no religion without love and people may talk as much as they like about their religion but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast it is all a sham.
We are pre-disposed for fantasy there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.
All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution and each religion has its own book of martyrs.
Basically fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.
To have dominion by religion is to have dominion over men's souls thus over their very spiritual life and to use the Divine things which are in their religion as the means.
I travel around the world experiencing every language every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile because their lives are so difficult.