Related quotes

America...You Kill Me

“Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.”
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 6 (pp. 52-53)
Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.53

" Sorry, but voters prefer straight choices http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/01/31/do3102.xml", Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2006
Youngest bishop in the U.S. ready to “propose the mystery” of the Church to Detroit https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/8177/youngest-bishop-in-the-us-ready-to-propose-the-mystery-of-the-church-to-detroit (November 29, 2006)

"Clinical Notes" in The American Mercury (January 1924), p. 75; also in Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)
1920s
Context: Critical note.—Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he prove it? Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman? He proves enough, indeed, when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing—that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The fact is enormously significant; it indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior to the shallowness of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

Quoted in "The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion" by Jeremiah J. Garretson, chapter 9, pg 229.