Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful.. Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way..speaking of crutches-- Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled. Herman Wouk
About This Quote

This quote is attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who also wrote the famous play, "Pygmalion". The statement refers to the idea that religion can be used by people to prop up their own sense of worthiness. If someone is feeling weak or fearful, they can use religion as a crutch. It is not an uncommon practice these days to use religion as a crutch.

It has become the norm to believe in something without ever questioning its validity. This quote is quite true in these times when you are bombarded with religious ideas all around you. It can be very difficult to tell what is really real.

Source: This Is My God: The Jewish Way Of Life

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike. - Oscar Wilde
  2. The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned - Antonio Gramsci
  3. A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed. - Mencius
  4. Dove la moralità è troppo forte l'intelletto perisce. - Friedrich Nietzsche
  5. My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing, ' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be. - Frank Herbert
More Quotes By Herman Wouk
  1. Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to...
  2. The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics...
  3. Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people...
  4. We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.
  5. Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge–not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of...
Related Topics