Quotes from Jonathan Sacks

The crucial differentiation between humans and all other animals is that we make meanings, and the name we give to collective systems of meanings is culture.

A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. Leaders must have the strength to know what they cannot be if they are to have the courage to be themselves.

What Jacob learned – and what we learn, hearing his story – is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved.

When everything is available, every lifestyle on offer, when all you have is freedom, but nothing to guide you in that freedom, "it's not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life, you have trouble even staying focused on the question.

I realised that health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to recover.

It is easy to be a critic, but the only effective critics are those who truly love – and show they love – those whom they criticise.

the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

As Shakespeare said, 'The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.'4

There are indeed moral universals — the Hebrew Bible calls them 'the covenant with Noah' and they form the basis of modern codes of human rights. But they exist to create space for cultural and religious difference…

It is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.

When you stop believing in God, there is no sudden explosion of light or darkness. The world continues on its accustomed course. The sky does not fall. The sun still shines. Life goes on. But something is lost nonetheless, something important that gives life connectedness, depth and a sense of purpose; that gives you a feeling of participating in something vast and consequential.

The greatest challenge of any society is how to contain the universal, inevitable phenomenon of envy, the desire to have what belongs to someone else. Envy lies at the heart of violence.

As Talmon writes, 'When a regime is by definition regarded as realizing rights and freedoms, the citizen becomes deprived of any right to complain that he is being deprived of his rights and liberties.'21 Whereas English liberty set limits to the state, French liberty was to be imposed by the state. If need be, said Rousseau, we must force people to be free.

The law of the sin offering reminds us that we can do harm unintentionally, and this can have consequences, both physical and psychological. The best way of putting things right is to make a sacrifice: to do something that costs us something.

A civilisation that had space for science but not religion might achieve technological prowess. But it would not respect people in their specificity and particularity. It would quickly become inhuman and inhumane. Think of the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, and you need no further proof.

Applying inflexible rules to a constantly shifting political landscape destroys societies. Communism was like that. In free societies, people change, culture changes, the world beyond a nation's borders does not stand still. So a politician will find that what worked a decade or a century ago does not work now. In politics it is easy to get it wrong, hard to get it right.

throughout the contemporary world, the more religious the group the higher its birth rate, and we see the power of religion to sustain community over time.

Although we looked hard at all the available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.

We shed a tear because, for a moment, we allow ourselves to think of the victims of our victories, the pain of the other side, who were enslaving us, but they were still human and they were still suffering. It's when you can feel your opponent's pain that you're beginning the path that leads to reconciliation.

Leadership demands two kinds of courage: the strength to take a risk, and the humility to admit when a risk fails.

To the Judaic mind this is paganism, and it is never morally neutral. God creates order; man creates chaos—and the result is inevitably destructive.

By the first century, a complete system of universal, compulsory education was in place, an achievement the Talmud attributes to Yehoshua b. Gamla (Bava Batra 21a), the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

One of the most profound contributions Torah made to the civilisation of the West is this: that the destiny of nations lies not in the externalities of wealth or power, fate or circumstance, but in moral responsibility: the responsibility for creating and sustaining a society that honours the image of God within each of its citizens, rich and poor, powerful or powerless alike.

Poverty is not, in Judaism, a blessed condition. It is, the rabbis said, "a kind of death"3 and "worse than fifty plagues" (Bava Batra 116a). They said, "Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, because he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.