Bill Maher Quotes

Human beings are religious animals.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

Religion is many things, but one of them, surely, is a way for adults to indulge in uncritical hero worship.

I am well aware that there is such a great craving in man for heroism and the heroic, and that hero worship forms not a small motif in his complex. I am also aware that, unless man believes in his own heroism and the heroism of others, he cannot achieve much or great things. We must, however, take proper care that we do not make a fetish of this cult of hero-worship, for then we will turn ourselves into votaries of false gods and prophets.

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

Yet, if he would, man cannot live all to this world. If not religious, he will be superstitious. IF he worship not the true God, he will have his idols.

I can't legislate to change human nature.

I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it.

The sum of religion, says Pythagoras, is to be like him thou worshipest. Had Pythagoras lived in our day he would have seen his mistake. The sum of modern religion is to make him thou worshipest like unto thyself.

In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

People do what they are told not to do. It happens time and time again. Here on the frozen tundra, it is known as the Tongue on the Frozen Pump Handle principle.

In one sense, the Stanford prison study is more like a Greek drama than a traditional experiment, in that we have humanity, represented by a bunch of good people, pitted against an evil-producing situation. The question is, does the goodness of the people overwhelm the bad situation, or does the bad situation overwhelm the good people?

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

I think that as human beings, we quite naturally take for granted what is similar among human beings and, then, pay attention to what differentiates us. That makes perfect sense for us as human beings.

Humans have always wondered the big questions, "Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?" It's part of human nature. It's perhaps the underpinnings of religion.

the more I know about people, the better I like my dogs.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

Humans are inscrutable. Infinitely unpredictable. This is what makes them dangerous.