"The Future of an Illusion" Quotes

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending oneself against the crushing supremacy of nature.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

The origin of religious needs is a subject which has given rise to many controversies.

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

The two great turning points in human history are the spirit’s discovery of its own reflection in a human being and finding the same reflection in the universe.