
“If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.”
Source: Northanger Abbey
Book I, line 101 (tr. Alicia Stallings)
H. A. J. Munro's translation:
So great the evils to which religion could prompt!
W. H. D. Rouse's translation:
So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds.
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
“If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.”
Source: Northanger Abbey
“Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.”
tracking with closeups (2) “Yonderboy”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Source: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him.
Source: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), p. 45
"The Emotional Factor"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Context: I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Tiresias, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
As quoted in The Age of the World : Moses to Darwin (1959) by Francis C. Haber, p. 221