Hotchkiss
1900s, Getting Married (1908)
Context: Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.
“Religion is a mighty motive force. So is rapine. But where religion in goaded on by rapine and rapine serves as a handmaid to religion, the propelling force that is generated by these together is only equalled by the profundity of human misery and devastation they leave behind them in their march. Heaven and Hell making a common case - such were the forces, overwhelmingly furious, that took India by surprise the day that Mahmud Ghaznavi crossed the Indus and invaded her.”
1923. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1992). Negationism in India: Concealing the record of Islam.
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Vinayak Damodar Savarkar 24
Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, … 1883–1966Related quotes
“Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.”
Article http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html for The Christian Science Monitor (21 November 2006).
p. 50 https://books.google.com/books?id=Zsm3TLe1cAUC&pg=PA50
The Expansion of England (1883)
Written in London, September 1802, l. 9 (1802).
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: Religions are for a day. They are the clouds. Humanity is the eternal blue. Religions are the waves of the sea. These waves depend upon the force and direction of the wind -- that is to say, of passion; but Humanity is the great sea. And so our religions change from day to day, and it is a blessed thing that they do. Why? Because we grow, and we are getting a little more civilized every day, -- and any man that is not willing to let another man express his opinion, is not a civilized man, and you know it. Any man that does not give to everybody else the rights he claims for himself, is not an honest man.
"Atomic War or Peace" part II (1947)
1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950)
Source: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Quoted by Nishitha Desai in Lusotopie 2000, p. 474