Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results.... Their commodity is fear. They blackmail their parishioners with threats of hell and damnation. These poor deluded people give them their hard earned money to save them from a hell that does not exist, and from eternal torment that was invented by the perverted minds of priests to rob the living and in addition, they are exempt from taxation! Insult to injury! Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great scheme of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey upon the ignorance and fears of the people. The penalty for this type of extortion should be as severe as it is of other forms of dishonesty.
Joseph LewisRelated topics
blackmail buy damnation exempt extortion fear great hard hell human ignorance injury insult last living man money pay poor prey profit race religion rob save service should taxation tellRelated quotes
Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into "town" (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I'll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then... I skimped and saved from one magazine to the next; I'd buy one copy and have it charged, and when the next issue was out, I'd pay for the one which I owed, and have the other one charged, and so on. So I generally owed for one, but only one.
Robert E. Howard
During the war we had to stop producing the everyday things which we need in peacetime. We had to concentrate on war production and the bare necessities of existence. The natural result is that to-day we are short of the things which we need... You may ask why cannot we get what we want from abroad? The answer is that we can only get it if we can pay for it. Before the war many of the things which we got from abroad-food and raw material-were paid for by the interest on foreign investments, and by services rendered by us to people in other countries. During the war we had to sell our foreign investments to pay for the arms, food, and other things we needed. Apart from any temporary relief we may get by loans from our friends across the Atlantic, we can only buy from abroad now if we can pay by exporting goods or rendering services.
Clement Attlee
Money! Money in Oz!" cried the Tin Woodman. "What a queer idea! Did you suppose we are so vulgar as to use money here?"
"Why not?" asked the shaggy man.
"If we used money to buy things with, instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another, then we should be no better than the rest of the world," declared the Tin Woodman. "Fortunately money is not known in the Land of Oz at all. We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in all Oz cares to have more than he can use."
"Good!" cried the shaggy man, greatly pleased to hear this. "I also despise money - a man in Butterfield owes me fifteen cents, and I will not take it from him. The Land of Oz is surely the most favored land in all the world, and its people the happiest. I should like to live here always.
L. Frank Baum
The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern.
William Godwin
Of all the horrid brutalities of our age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions-yes I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak-millions of poor, heart broken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in lathing and disgust.... The world has got to be startled from this pretense into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invests men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills, yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality! ...
Victoria Woodhull