“Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”
Source: Toast, and Other Stories
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Charles Stross 211
British science fiction writer and blogger 1964Related quotes

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

On Italians, sometimes cited to The Rommel Papers (1953) edited by Basil Henry Liddell Hart, but without specific chapter or page citations; it seems to summarize an attitude indicated by Rommel in Ch. 11 of that work, but no published occurrence of this has actually been located.
Disputed

“It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.”
My Mother’s House, "The Priest on the Wall" (1922)

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”
Variant: The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

“All religious expression is symbolism”
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 62
Context: All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word " spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe.

Part 2, 00:30:25
Part 2: "The Virus Of Faith", quoted at ibid.
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)
“Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand--an extended application of its powers.”
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah
Slowly Calm Returns to Gambella After Fierce Ethnic Clashes. Concern for 16,000 People in Flight Towards Sudan http://www.fides.org/en/news/1553-AFRICA_ETHIOPIA_SLOWLY_CALM_RETURNS_TO_GAMBELLA_AFTER_FIERCE_ETHNIC_CLASHES_CONCERN_FOR_16_000_PEOPLE_IN_FLIGHT_TOWARDS_SUDAN (20 January 2004)

2015, Remarks to the Kenyan People (July 2015)