Francesco Guicciardini Quotes

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

As long as there are religions, there are going to be people who are hiding their rottenness behind the veil of religion.

We eat, drink, and sleep religion, but we do not do good.

Further, Take heed that you faithfully perform the business you have to do in the world, from a regard to the commands of God; and not from an ambitious desire of being esteemed better than others.

Christianity is entitled to the tribute of respect. I do not of course mean that all individuals, nominally Christian, deserve trust, confidence, or even respect, for the contrary is too often the case. Too often, men hold religion as they do property - in their wives' names.

He who is a slave to his stomach seldom worships God.

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

At the time I perceived most religious men, particularly the pastors with all their talk about love, faith and relationship, as effeminate.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

Every religion there's something foul going on.

Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem — for purely religious purposes, of course — to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.

Much prayer, but no piety.

Be ...a preacher of piety, not an exactor of tithes...

These are the meats to abstain from- others' wealth, others' wives, slander, envy, covetousness and pride.

Shall piety be a license to immoral deeds, and shall religion be regarded as affording the occasion for all riotous extravagance?

Some of the most intelligent people I've met in my life are priests and pastors; now, a lot of them aren't that, though. Some of the most sanctimonious and hypocritical people I've met are priests and pastors, also.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. "I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness." "May I ask for a specific example?" "Fat priests," Royce replied, "with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty.

Let a man rise to power, and he has as many virtues as will furnish an epitaph. Let him fall from power, and he has more vices than the Prodigal Son.

America is so terribly grim in spite of all that material prosperity.... Compassion and the old neighborliness have gone, people stand by and do nothing when friends and neighbors are attacked, libeled and ruined. The worst thing is what is done to the children. They are being taught to admire and emulate stool pigeons, to betray and to hate, and all in a sickening atmosphere of religious hypocrisy.

This uneasy desire to augment our territory has depraved the moral sense and blighted the otherwise keen sagacity of our people.

Behind the façade of robes and incense, clerical privilege was allowed to trump the Gospel