The fact that writers who are considered great by most people are ascribed a special, exclusive significance and importance constitutes a great obstacle to the discovery of truth. Divine truth can manifest in the babbling of a child, in the chatter of a fool, in the ravings of an insane person, to say nothing of the conversations and letters of ordinary people, and one can find very weak and false thoughts in books that are considered great or sacred.
There are many traditional truths that seem probable to us only because we have never seriously thought about them.
Rod
The Gospel should be considered holy not because it was written by the apostles, but because there is truth in it. The truth, spoken by Buddha, Muhammad or anyone else, is just as important as the truth of the Gospel.
To insist on the application of ancient and obsolete laws found in our statutes is the same as to force the people of our time to live in the houses and to use the tools of our ancestors who lived many generations before us.
Lucy Mallory
With by far the greater part of mankind, religion is a habit, or rather, habit is a religion. However paradoxical it may seem, it appears to me that to reject Religion is the first step towards moral excellence; at least, no man ever attained to the highest degree of the latter by any other road.
Thoreau
A thought expressed in the Gospel, in the Bible, in the Quran, in the Upanishads does not become true because it is expressed in books that are considered sacred. To regard everything said in a book deemed sacred to be true is to worship books as idols, which is more harmful than all other forms of idolatry.
Every thought, regardless of its source, is subject to discussion, and every thought, regardless of its source, deserves attention.