Quotes About Belief

Once a large majority of Americans came to believe that the federal government was uninspiring or incompetent or corrupt or evil, as they rapidly had over the previous decade, it was going to be a lot easier for the economic right to persuade people that regulating big business and taxing the rich were just plain wrong.

Women are much more likely than men to say they're "spiritual," whereas two-thirds of people who call themselves agnostic or atheist are men. So male seculars go elsewhere to satisfy their need to believe in the untrue—for instance, men constitute large majorities of devoted believers in nonexistent conspiracies.

In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else's. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

Extreme American gun love really is a lot like American religious faith.

the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That's the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God's orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and civilians believed and said again and again, "God is on our side." Sermons on both sides depicted the war as part of the divine plan, a holy battle on the way to Armageddon and Christ's reign.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God." —MARK TWAIN, "Corn-Pone Opinions" (1901)

Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —PHILIP K. DICK

I don't need to be inspired any longer, just supported.

I finally understood—I possessed more control than I had believed. Healthy people didn't always understand the scope of how much could be overcome. I certainly never had before I got sick.

In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality. p.403

Giving somebody false hope is worse than not giving them any hope at all, I think. You want to be honest with people even in small things because if you're not, then how will they believe you in anything that you say? The whole idea is the trust that you develop with your patient is something that's the responsibility of the doctor. It's as important as the medicine that you give somebody, if that's necessary.

I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

Impossible is not a word. It's just a reason for someone not to try.

Never let anyone lower your goals. Others' expectations of you are determined by their limitations of life.

it's just one miss, but you're gonna have a whole lotta makes in this life, 'cause you're just that good, and it's okay to be down and upset as long as you're not down and out.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes His little bit the whole to own.

Un día hablamos del paraíso, ¿no? Tú dijiste que no creías ni en el otro mundo ni en el paraíso, ¿te acuerdas? -Sí, me acuerdo. -Si la muerte tiene algún sentido, ¿no crees que es incongruente negar la existencia del otro mundo y del paraíso? -¿Por qué? -Porque al morir todo acaba, ¿no? Y si no existe un después, es imposible que la muerte tenga sentido...