But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

Morality will perform all this; and Morality is the fruit of Illumination.

G is Grace, the Flaming Star is the Torch of Reason. Those who possess this knowledge are indeed Illuminati.

And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.

In another situation, and in an active station in life, I should have been keenly occupied, and the founding of an order would have never come into my head.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

The first task of the association must therefore be to form the young members.

Nothing would be more profitable to us than a right history of mankind.

I am proud to be known to the world as the founder of the Illuminati.

I did not bring Deism into Bavaria.

My general plan is good, though in the detail there may be faults.

It was the full conviction of this, and of what could be done, if every man were placed in the office for which he was fitted by nature and a proper education, which first suggested to me the plan of Illumination.

But I would have executed much greater things, had not government always opposed my exertions, and placed others in situations which would have suited my talents.

Let this circumstance of our constitution therefore be directed to this noble purpose, and then all the objections urged against it by jealous tyranny and affrighted superstition will vanish.

The head of every family will be what Abraham was, the patriarch, the priest and the unlettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the code of laws to all mankind.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.

When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished.

Of all the means I know to lead men, the most effectual is a concealed mystery.

The human race will then become one family, and the world will be the dwelling of Rational Men.

The hankering of the mind is irresistible.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

The media seems to think only abortion and gay marriage are religious issues. Poverty is a moral issue, it's a faith issue, it's a religious issue.

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.

The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?

I am not here to parade my religious sentiments, but I declare I have too much respect for the faith in which I was born to ever use it as the basis of a political organization.

Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her.

Religious advertising is undergoing a dramatic conversion.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence.

I only drank for three years of my life, but I drank enough in those three years to last me the rest of my life... It's a religious thing.

Many of us view the bible and other religious teachings as mythology.

I'm not religious, but I believe that what I have is a gift, and I respect it and live up to it.

We have a need to be religious, we need to worship, we need to build totems and shrines and icons, but nobody's sure in honor of what.

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Among the many reasons assignable for the sad decay of true Christianity, perhaps the neglecting to assemble ourselves together, in religious societies, may not be one of the least.

In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.

Americans should be free to recognize our religious heritage; doing that is not the same as creating a government-sponsored religion.

Not all Modern Orthodox Jews, at the present juncture, identify with what the Israeli government does. In Israel many religious Zionists strongly oppose the government because of the disengagement.

Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

There was no religious ceremony connected with marriage among us, while on the other hand the relation between man and woman was regarded as in itself mysterious and holy.

Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.