And yet this same Deity says to me, resist not evil; pray for those that despitefully use you; love your enemies, but I will eternally damn mine. It seems to me that even gods should practice what they preach.

Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty, and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment.

I am not so much for the freedom of religion as I am for the religion of freedom.

If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, on Christs, priest, or creeds.

Small people delight in what they call consistency-that is, it gives them immense pleasure to say that they believe now exactly as they did ten years ago. This simply amounts to a certificate that they have not grown-that they have not developed-and that they know just as little now as they ever did. The highest possible conception of consistency is to be true to the knowledge of today, without the slightest reference to what your opinion was years ago.

I would rather live with the woman I love in a world full of trouble, than to live in heaven with nobody but men.

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars -- an intellectual ocean -- toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain.