William James quote: “Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

“The pivot round which the religious life… revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.

“No religion, without exception, will ever serve to bring men together and reconcile them. They have been and will continue to be a cause of unspeakable sufferings, of carnage, or monstrous physical and spiritual acts of violence that constitute one of the darkest chapters in human history.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Le religioni, tutte, senza eccezione, non serviranno mai per avvicinare e riconciliare gli uomini e, al contrario, sono state e continuano a essere causa di sofferenze inenarrabili, di stragi, di mostruose violenze fisiche e spirituali che costituiscono uno dei più tenebrosi capitoli della misera storia umana.
La Repubblica http://www.repubblica.it/online/mondo/saramago/saramago/saramago.html (20 September 2001)

“18 chapters of Vyasa's Jaya constitutes the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred text of the Hindus. Thus, this work of Vyasa, called Jaya deals with diverse subjects like geography, history, warfare, religion and morality.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

B. K. Pandey, in Encyclopaedia of Indian philosophers, Volume 2 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=d8ROAQAAIAAJ, p. 14.
Sources

“A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.”

Luís Gama (1830–1882) Brazilian lawyer, poet, abolitionist and journalist

Gazeta da Tarde, [Carta a Ferreira de Menezes], January 07, 1881. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama https://aventurasnahistoria.uol.com.br/noticias/reportagem/defendeu-escravizados-o-inestimavel-legado-do-jornalista-luiz-gama-.phtml.

“The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institutions may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest of purposes.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Source: 1780s, p. 34 of a draft of a discarded and undelivered version of his first inaugural address (30 April 1789)
Context: The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institutions may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest of purposes. Should, hereafter, those who are intrusted with the management of this government, incited by the lust of power & prompted by the supineness or venality of their Constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to shew, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction & sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable—and if I may so express myself, that no wall of words—that no mound of parchmt can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.

“The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Ordeal by Labyrinth, Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (1982),  p. 148
Context: The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

“In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"C.P. Cavafy", p. 341
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
The virtue of patriotism has been extolled most loudly and publicly by nations that are in the process of conquering others, by the Roman, for example, in the first century B. C., the French in the 1790s, the English in the nineteenth century, and the Germans in the first half of the twentieth. To such people, love of one's country involves denying the right of others, of the Gauls, the Italians, the Indians, the Poles, to love theirs.

“[T]here is a tremendous egotism and conceit in those popular articles and lectures entitled,"My Idea of Religion," or "My Idea of God." An individual religion can be as misleading and uninformed as an individual astronomy or an individual mathematics.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 4, p. 59

“Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?”

William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair

Source: Vanity Fair

“His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men, and in the history of more than one science.”

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) physicist

From Gibbs's obituary for Rudolf Clausius (1889). See The Collected Works of J. Willard Gibbs, vol. 2 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), p. 267. Complete volume http://www.archive.org/details/collectedworksj00longgoog

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

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