Quotes from Susan Jacoby

I no more believe in the God of the Jews than I believe in any God.

I don't ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can't imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things.

I don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.

I believe that whether one believes in God or not is - it's very central to who I am.

The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization

hope is not a plan of action.

Once the Roman Catholic Church in the West became the church most closely connected with the state, the Roman Catholic Church did not recognize the validity of any religion other than its own.

I completely can't understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it's right.

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.

A person can be religious and still respect secular values and not talk about Jesus all the time as though every American believed in Jesus.

Whether you are religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer no more.

I think people who love each other and live together and have children together need to agree on the things that are most important in life.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.

If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.

High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.

That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter writes. "Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: 'Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!'"5

What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly "designed" the order of nature.

While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.