Quotes & Sayings About Religious Intolerance

It was Pope Innocent III who placed in the hands of the church this terrible weapon of persecution, and who, by the awful severity of his own attitude towards liberty of conscience, of thought, and of expression, afforded to fanaticism and religious intolerance an example that was to be their merciless guide through centuries to come. — Rafael Sabatini

History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing. — Montesquieu

Growing up, the two things that made my blood boil were religious intolerance and animal cruelty. I've never understood it. I can't stand to have an animal in pain. — Ricky Gervais

In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on. — Marshall Fritz

The religious issue was dragged out, and stirred up flames of hatred and intolerance. Clergymen, mobilizing their heaviest artillery of thunder and brimstone, threatened Christians with all manner of dire consequences if they should vote for the 'in fidel' from Virginia. This was particularly true in New England, where the clergy stood like Gibraltar against Jefferson. — Saul K. Padover

In every religion, there are those who would drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort it's most sacred teachings - preaching intolerance and resorting to violence. — Hillary Clinton

[The Drafters of the Constitution] were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe. — John M Swomley

Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance. — Walter Scott

In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies. — Nicholas Kristof

Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. — Albert Einstein

The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others. — Adolf Hitler

There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as in matters political and material; and more and more we must all realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma. — Theodore Roosevelt

Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism ... of sexism ... of religious intolerance ... of war ... of gross economic inequality But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control. — Paul R. Ehrlich

It is necessary to name the enemy of human civilization, and this enemy is international terrorism associated with religious fundamentalism and religious intolerance. — Milos Zeman

Tolerance is not a synonym of Weakness — Satyendra Singh 'Shyamal'

I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end ... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice. — John F. Kennedy

My goal in changing how the world thinks about religion is not to make people stop believing in a god or gods; I care little for what people desire to believe in their own private lives. However, I care deeply about what they do with those beliefs. If their religious beliefs teach intolerance and hatred, are used to support war, genocide, female genital mutilation, honor killings or laws that protect or honor such rituals or beliefs, then we have a problem and I will stand up against every such instance and fight it with every means available to me. — Dan Arel

This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this. — Mary Heaton Vorse

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. — John Stuart Mill

The disease of intolerance is not communicated only in religious groups. I've seen it infect racial groups, economic groups and even whole nations (where it is often cleverly disguised as patriotism). Intolerance always fences people out. It creates one group we call US. And the rest we call THEM. — Steve Goodier

In Scotland, Catholics have raised their voices against sectarianism and intolerance directed against the Church. Clearly, these actions show that freedom of religious expression, a basic human right, is not upheld in our midst as widely and as completely as it should be. — Keith O'Brien

Let me speak plainly: The United States of America is and must remain a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. Our very unity has been strengthened by this pluralism. That's how we began; this is how we must always be. The ideals of our country leave no room whatsoever for intolerance, anti-Semitism, or bigotry of any kind
none. The unique thing about America is a wall in our Constitution separating church and state. It guarantees there will never be a state religion in this land, but at the same time it makes sure that every single American is free to choose and practice his or her religious beliefs or to choose no religion at all. Their rights shall not be questioned or violated by the state.
Remarks at the International Convention of B'nai B'rith, 6 September 1984 — Ronald Reagan

In commendably seeking to protect freedom of speech, we must not lower our defences against the evil of racial and religious intolerance. — Barry O'Farrell

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized. — John Stuart Mill

Christians have oppressed Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Pagans, and each other throughout their centuries of power, preaching religious intolerance as the word of Jehovah whenever they had the military, political, or economic power to make it stick - and then piously preaching brotherhood, peace, and toleration when they didn't. — Isaac Bonewits

There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. — Isaac Hayes

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others. — Thomas Jefferson

I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion ... I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste. — Georges Bizet

The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people from religion; that amendment was written to protect religion from government tyranny ... But now we're told our children have no right to pray in school. Nonsense. The pendulum has swung too far toward intolerance against genuine religious freedom. It is time to redress the balance. — Ronald Reagan

My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant. — Nick Flynn

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do ... — Russell Baker

I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who - in their grudge against the traditional "opium of the people" - cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human morals and human aims. — Albert Einstein

America has become politically and culturally agnostic, and the Christian faith in the minds of many has come to represent intolerance. — Benjamin Hart

People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts. — Dorothy L. Sayers

We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic - a moral code independent of religion - strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities? — Will Durant

Isn't it time we asked ourselves, are we willing to accept any behavior codified within religious or cultural practice? Is there no line to be drawn? If honor killings are okay, then why not virgin sacrifices or cannibalism or sex with children outside the church? We have perversely taken our notion of tolerance to such extremes that we've become tolerant of intolerance. — Bill Maher

An important distinction needs to be made in politics between allowing your values to guide you and keeping religion and government separate. Liberals are rightly concerned about government-established and government-supported religion, especially in our religiously polyglot society. But their unwillingness to engage on policy at the level of transcendent and timeless values, for fear of something too moralistic or religious, yields too much ground to the radical political right, which has come to claim Christianity in particular to advance a deeply non-Christian agenda. Theirs is a faith based on intolerance, a faith without compassion. Hating homosexuals and despising immigrants instead of hating poverty and despising homelessness seems to miss the point of a life of faithfulness. — Deval Patrick

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution. — William Butler Yeats

The Republicans love to say that the Democratic Party is ruled by 'special interests.' But when pressed to name these 'special interests,' the usual reply is women, blacks, teachers, and unions. Those are 'special interests' to be proud of - because together they comprise the majority of Americans. What about the 'special interests' that dominate the Republican Party - the oil companies, the banks, the gun lobby, and the apostles of religious intolerance? — Geraldine Ferraro

A clearly written and passionately argued indictment of centuries of antisemitism that contributed to Nazi extermination of the Jews. Wilensky has read widely, thought deeply, and writes persuasively in placing the Holocaust into the larger context of the history of Western Christianity. What he concludes is deeply disturbing and must be confronted seriously by scholars and public alike. Six Million Crucifixions is an important book for our- - or any - age of religious conflict and intolerance. — Geoffrey Cocks

There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance ... Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide — R.J. Rushdoony

Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality. And if it should occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality before the law. We have learnt toleration in Europe. This is not sarcastically said; for the Anti-Semitism of today could only in a very few places be taken for old religious intolerance. It is for the most part a movement among civilized nations by which they try to chase away the spectres of their own past. LAWS — Theodor Herzl

The men and women who forged this nation [USA] were straight-up maniacs about freedom. It was just about the only thing they cared about, so they jammed it into everything. This is understandable, as they were breaking away from a monarchy. But it's also a little bonkers, since one of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough and that they needed the freedom to live by non-secular laws that were more restrictive than that of any government, including provisions for the burning of suspected witches. — Chuck Klosterman

Real chains that we need to shed are the burdens of racial discrimination, economic disparity, religious dogmas, intolerance and social injustice, which still weigh heavily on our shoulders. — Balroop Singh

One thing evangelicals want is a reprieve from intolerance against their beliefs, values, and practices. — Ronald H. Nash

If one holds these high principles clearly before one's eyes, and compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it appears glaringly that civilized mankind finds itself at present in grave danger. In the totalitarian states it is the rulers themselves who strive actually to destroy that spirit of humanity. In less threatened parts it is nationalism and intolerance, as well as the oppression of the individuals by economic means, which threaten to choke these most precious traditions. — Albert Einstein

I HAVE NO DOUBT THAT when this book comes out, Scientologists will scream about religious intolerance, say that I am a liar, that I was kicked out of the church, and call Troublemaker the work of a hateful bigot or a self-absorbed person with an "insatiable craving for attention." (That last part might not be totally untrue; I am an actress, after all.) What they will likely not do, however, is actually read this book, because that would be going against one of the basic tenets of Scientology. A member should not read or watch anything generated by someone whom the church — Leah Remini

There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which springs from fear. Sometimes it is a religious intolerance, sometimes it is a racial intolerance, but all intolerance grows from the same roots. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance ... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason. — Charles De Secondat

I have a deep-seated bias against hate and intolerance. I have a bias against racial and religious bigotry. I have a bias that leads me to believe in the essential goodness of my fellow man, which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble. — Ralph Bunche

The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political. — Abhijit Naskar

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [ ... ]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours. — Richard Rorty

Abraham had eight sons
not one. All eight sons bring something to the table. Abraham loved all of his sons. He was a good father who made sure all his sons were literate, of good character and shared a common ideology with their father, Abraham. Abraham did good. Where did we go wrong?
pg 54 — Michael Ben Zehabe

Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. — Thomas Jefferson

It is often said that Europeans learned religious intolerance from the Old Testament. Then how did we happen to skip over the parts where the laws protect and provide for the poor, and where oppression of them is most fiercely forbidden? It is surely dishonest to suggest we learned anything at all from the Torah, if we have not learned anything good from it. Better to say our vices are our own than to try to exculpate ourselves by implying that our attention strayed during the humane and visionary passages. The law of Moses puts liberation theology to shame in its passionate loyalty to the poor. — Marilynne Robinson

It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of "religious violence," we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence. — Jack David Eller

[H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)] — Salman Rushdie

The zealous disdain for religion in American jurisprudence amounts to intolerance. Keith Fournier of the American Center for Law and Justice concludes that 'the ones not being tolerated are religious people who dare make any kind of religious reference or take any kind of religious posture outside the private arena. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.

By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars. Throughout our two hundred plus years, public policy debate has focused on political and economic issues, on which there can be compromise ... — Barry Goldwater

If you're gay or religious you're always hearing this word tolerance. It's a pathetic word. It's actually just a politically correct word for the term intolerance. — Rupert Everett

I believe in a wall between church and state so high that no one can climb over it. When religion controls government, political liberty dies; and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes. Every American has the constitutional right not to be taxed or have his tax money expended for the establishment of religion. For too long the issue of government aid to church related organizations has been a divisive force in our society and in the Congress. It has erected communication barriers among our religions and fostered intolerance. — Sam Ervin

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. — Romain Gary

It seems obvious that both the religious and the irreligious are capable of varying degrees of tolerance or intolerance, benevolence or malice, depending on how they understand the moral implications of their beliefs. — David Bentley Hart

Be wary of any man who is quick to put down another man's faith. His love for Truth is not deep enough for him to want to explore additional truths outside his borders. The language of light can only be decoded by the heart. Thus, a man with a closed heart is already blind to understand the words of his own faith. — Suzy Kassem

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. — John F. Kennedy

Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine. — Jonathan Swift

There is no relationship here between Church and State. Religious liberty has its unalterable place, along with civil and human liberty, in the very foundation of the Republic. I hold it [religious intolerance] to be a menace to the very liberties which we boast and cherish. — Warren G. Harding

Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice. — Cal Thomas

President Kennedy's election was such an enlargement. It expanded religious freedom to include the highest office in the land. President Kennedy's administration was such an enlargement. It advanced the day when the bars of intolerance against all minority groups will be lifted, not only for the presidency, but for all aspects of our national life. — Robert Kennedy

We talk of regional conflicts, of economic and social crises, of political instability, of abuses of human rights, of racism, religious intolerance, inequalities between rich and poor, hunger, over-population, under-development and. I could go on and on. Each and every one of these impediments to humanity's pursuit of well-being are also among the root causes of refugee problems. — Poul Hartling

My teaching - of what is perceived to be a complex and foreign sounding religious philosophy - has become the target for people's prejudice and religious intolerance. — Frederick Lenz

The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell. — Aleister Crowley

In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish. — Warren G. Harding

The most damaging forms of intolerance are connected with religious, racial and political differences of opinion. — Napoleon Hill

Colonization of the world, more often than not by robbery and warfare, spread Christianity into the Americas and other corners of the earth, just as Islam was spread throughout Asia and Africa. lt is not a coincidence that the two most widespread religions in the world today are the most warlike and intolerant religions in history. Before the rise of Christianity, religious tolerance, including a large degree of religious freedom, was not only custom but in many ways law under the Roman and Persian empires. They conquered for greed and power, rarely for any declared religious reasons, and actually sought to integrate foreign religions into their civilization, rather than seeking to destroy them. People were generally not killed because they practiced a different religion. Indeed, the Christians were persecuted for denying that the popular gods existed - not for following a different religion. In other words, Christians were persecuted for being intolerant. — Richard Carrier

I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance. — Vikram Seth

I intend to be the president of all citizens of Macedonia, regardless of their ethnic or religious background, regardless of their political standing. I shall not allow ethnic hatred and intolerance to undermine Macedonia's stability. — Boris Trajkovski

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have. I merely give robust expression to views about the cosmos and morality with which you happen to disagree. You interpret that as 'intolerance' because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, which expects to get a free ride and not have to defend itself. If I wrote a book called The Socialist Delusion or The Monetarist Delusion, you would never use a word like intolerance. But The God Delusion sounds automatically intolerant. Why? What's the difference? I have a (you might say fanatical) desire for people to use their own minds and make their own choices, based upon publicly available evidence. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'. There is a huge difference. — Richard Dawkins

Thomas Henri Huxley often preached tolerance, but in practice he could not wait to go after religion and religious people in the most scornful of terms.
[Curb your enthusiasm,2016] — Michael Ruse

if religious people are going to be blamed for all the intolerance, then non-religious people simply have no right to be intolerant themselves. — Tom Hilpert

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.
[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772] — Benjamin Franklin

The world was sick, and the ills from which it was suffering were mainly due to the perversion of man, his inability to live at peace with himself. The microbe was no longer the main enemy; science was sufficiently advanced to be able to cope with it admirably. If it were not for such barriers as superstition, ignorance, religious intolerance, misery and poverty. — Brock Chisholm

I have never conceived that having been in public life required me to belie my sentiments, or to conceal them. Opinion and the just maintenance of it shall never be a crime in my view, nor bring injury on the individual. I never will by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance. I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own; a reserve on these subjects might have procured me more esteem from some people, but less from myself. — Thomas Jefferson

Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender. — Francis Fukuyama

Baptists have always strenuously contended for the acknowledgment of this principle, and have labored to propagate it. Nowhere, on the page of history, can an instance be found of Baptists depriving others of their religious liberties, or aiming to do so; but, wherever they ave found, even in tlie darkest ages of intolerance and persecution, they appear to be far in advance of those who surround them, on this important subject. This is simply owing to their adherence to the Gospel of Christ in its purity. Here religious liberty is taught in its fullest extent; and it was only when the Christian church departed from God's Word, that she sought to crush the rights of conscience; and only when she fully returns to it again, will she cease to cherish a desire to do so. — John Quincy Adams