Quotes About Belief

What is it about our specific belief in God and His wishes that makes us so angry at the specific beliefs of another? What is it about the teachings of our respective deities that makes us more right than the next person? Or more wrong?

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility.

All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just ask this person how they feel about any issue that doesn't have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma.

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

We're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.

We all convince ourselves of things like this- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made.

Every time period that's ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism 'May you live in interesting times' did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.

I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.

the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe.... is, however, socially detrimental . It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.

Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.

People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or—at the very least—why their wrongness "felt right at the time," which is very, very different from being authentically correct.

Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all.

Tricks Aren't Illusions

What matters more is what The Phantom Menace has come to represent: the saddest repudiation—and the harshest confirmation—of the entire Generation X ethos. The pop culture lionized by young adults of the nineties was often based on a myth: the dogmatic belief that things they'd loved as children had always been appreciated with adult minds.

The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously.

One of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough.

Whenever someone says something that's both realistic and abhorrent, It makes me suspect everyone else is lying about everything else.