Quotes About Belief

I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don't agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.

I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.

I used to think I actually was Batman.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

At Dell, we believe the customer is in control, and our job is to take all the technology that's out there and apply it in a useful way to meet the customer's needs.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

I have to read something positive every single day. I have to have faith that the day is unfolding in a way that is going to be useful to somebody else... For me, living every day in gratitude has been profound for me.

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

The usefulness of religion - the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good - is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.

Experiments were not attempted at that time, we did not believe in the usefulness of the concept anyway, and I finished my thesis in 1962 with a feeling like an artist balancing on a high rope without any interested spectators.

I believe that contentment or any sustained period of joy that doesn't inspire thought that leads to action almost immediately is useless.

You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren't true. They're useless. But that's not the way we work.

Confidence is very simple. It is the stuff that turns thoughts into action. Thoughts without action are pretty useless.

I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.

It has become more acceptable to describe yourself as a conservative, but not everyone who uses that term about themselves really is truly conservative.

'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.

I hope that the German people will never again make the mistake of believing that because the American people are peace-loving, they will sit back hoping for peace if any nation uses force or the threat of force to acquire dominion over other peoples and other governments.

Terrorism and extremism bear different names and labels. It uses diverse causes. But in each case, it is driven by distortion of religion and a misguided belief in its power to succeed.

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

Japanese chefs believe our soul goes into our knives once we start using them. You wouldn't put your soul in a dishwasher!

I'm a little skeptical about using the Constitution this way, but I also believe marriage is between a man and a woman and that the courts shouldn't legislate this matter.

I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.