Terrence Hand

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. 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.”
― Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism

“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
― Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World