Nothing but truth is immortal.

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.

If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion's sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker.

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.

It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike.

Either god should have written a book to fit my brain, or he should have made my brain to fit his book.

Do not trust those in whom the compulsion to punish is strong.