Priestly Power Quotes

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.

Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest

There are two principles by which the world is ruled: the authority of priests and the royal power. The authority of priests is the greater because God will demand an accounting of them even in regard to kings.

There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of true believers each damns all the others with more or less heartiness - and each is a mighty fortress of graft.

Priesthood is the means whereby the Lord acts through men to save souls. One of the defining features of the Church of Jesus Christ, both anciently and today, is His authority. There can be no true Church without divine authority.

History would have told them [the people] how half-literate priests taught the working people patience and submission to the "authorities appointed by God"; how peasants were made monks by force and monasteries built with their man-power; how the number of "lay parasites" was swollen and brought into being, in which the peasant worked with a plough and his parasite with a spoon. To increase its power and influence over the ignorant people, the church staged flimsy tricks which it called "miracles," from the boyars it created "saints," men of God--all for the benefit of the authorities. The main task of all churches was one and the same: to impress upon the poor serfs that there was no happiness for them on earth; happiness was prepared for them in heaven, and meanwhile back-breaking toil for some other fellow was pleasing in the sight of God.

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power…

Military despotism represses generous sentiments, priestly tyranny stifles them.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

... I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself.

A wicked Capuchin [a politically sophisticated priest] has disarmed me with his rosary, and thrust nothing less than six electoral crowns into his cowl.

Christ is the source of all true priesthood authority and power on earth. It is His work, in which we are privileged to assist.

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.

The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum - the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.

Without Jesus they were the great priests of the temple; with Jesus suddenly they were nobodies. In the presence of Jesus there was God himself and all the priests felt their glory had been taken away.

In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government.

The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever more dangerous. Jesus had to work on the perilous confines of reason and religion; and a step to the right or left might place him within the grasp of the priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.

Priesthood is forever and does not cease when a priest cannot carry out that priestly ministry.

New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.

I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain.