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"Eternal punishment is eternal revenge, and can be inflicted only by an eternal monster. ... Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal jailer hardens, debases and pollutes even the vilest soul." - "Origin of God and the Devil"
"The idea of hell was born of ignorance, brutality, fear, cowardice and revenge. This idea testifies that our remote ancestors were the lowest beasts." - ibid.
"The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever." - "Crumbling Creeds"
"Did it ever occur to you that if God wrote the Old Testament, and told the Jews to crucify or kill anybody who disagreed with them in religion, and that this God afterward took upon himself flesh and came to Jerusalem, and taught a different religion, and the Jews killed him - did it ever occur to you that he reaped exactly what he had sown?" - "Orthodoxy"
"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith!" - "The Gods," 1872
"Man, gathering courage from a succession of victories over the obstructions of nature, will attain a serene grandeur unknown to the disciples of any superstition." - ibid.
"An honest God is the noblest work of man." - ibid.
"To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all creeds." - "Some Mistakes of Moses"
"The 'Sabbath' was born of asceticism, hatred of human joy, fanaticism, ignorance, egotism of priests and the cowardice of people." - ibid.
"A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, infamous and hideous - such is the God of the Pentateuch." - ibid.
"In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns on the heads of thieves, called kings." - Prose Poems and Selections, 1884
"No man of any humor ever founded a religion." - "What Must Be Done to Be Saved?"
"There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven." - ibid.
"I have had some trouble in regarding evil as having been intended by infinite Goodness." - letter to Mrs. J.C. Euwer, Nov. 23, 1886
"The country that has got the least religion is the most prosperous, and the country that has got the most religion is in the worst condition." - speech in Boston, April 23, 1880
"Our hope of immortality does not come from any religion, but nearly all religions come from that hope." - quoted in the Chicago Times, Nov. 14, 1879
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