“So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.”
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)
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Lucretius45
Roman poet and philosopher -94–-55 BCRelated quotes
“Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.”
John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar
tracking with closeups (2) “Yonderboy”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Bertrand Russell book Why I Am Not a Christian
"The Emotional Factor"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Jon Krakauer (1954) American outdoors writer and journalist
Source: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) German Jewish philosopher and theologian
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
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
"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.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
Tiresias, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
William Buckland (1784–1856) English clergyman, geologist and palaeontologist
As quoted in The Age of the World : Moses to Darwin (1959) by Francis C. Haber, p. 221