"There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952 / The Life of Reason / 1905)
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952 / The Life of Reason / 1905)
"That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952 / The Life of Reason / 1905)
"Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952 / Imaginative Nature of Religion)
"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)
"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests."
(George Santayana / 1863-1952)