Bill Maher Quotes

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth".

Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.

In a chaotic world, fundamentalism can be a moral compass.

What happens when we put belief in front of reason? When we even put belief above human life?

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.

Religion has played a big part in eliminating the nuance in humanity. People began to believe things before they knew them. It stopped people from listening and learning with the patience and love of the God they believe in.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.

Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.

One of the reasons why fundamentalists are so aggressive in trying to promote fundamentalism is because deep down they know it's arbitrary. If you're comfortable with your belief you don't need to convince other people to agree with you.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.