“I have managed most of my life to exclude religious speculation from my mode of thought. I've found that, on the whole, it adds very little to economics.”

"Indeed, it is becoming somewhat of a commonplace with observers of criminal life in European communities that the criminal and dissolute classes are, if anything, rather more devout, and more naïvely so, than the average of the population."

“ [A]lthough my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition.”

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
“The first requisite of the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”

What sort of religion will transform capitalism? A “statist” religion, says Heilbroner, that will elevate mankind's “collective and communal destiny” and absolutely subordinate private interests to public requirements.

“The political climate in our house was generally and loosely left: it was unthinkable that a Jew, our sort of Jew, the artisan Jewish worker, self-employed, poor, Yiddish-speaking, unassimilated, non-religious, could be anything but socialistic.”