Quotes About Conviction

One night, he confessed to me that he was horrified by his first experience of the radical methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to combat the partisans; but his profound conviction that only a barbarous, completely inhuman enemy could necessitate such extreme measures had in the end been reinforced. "In the SD, you must have seen some atrocious things," he added; I assured him I had, but preferred not to elaborate. Instead

ritual heightens grief, makes it momentous, enforces concentration on its object who is yet gone for so short a time that it is unimaginable that he will not come back – the conviction of death's certainty is founded on prolonged exposure to absence rather than on the presence of the meat in the coffin or on bearing witness to the agent (physical or chemical, alien or quisling, sudden or chronic) of that immeasurable change.

There has to be an easier way. That was the conviction that inspired Jon Schlossberg and Quinten Farmer to launch a technology company named Even whose mission is to help families deal with income spikes and dips.

Fundamentalism—the intellectual style, not the religious movement—is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.

Courage is the will to lay aside fear because your desire to do right outweighs your desire to avoid getting hurt.

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

The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery

Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal

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

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.

And it was easy to believe her, standing beside him like that — her hair tied back from her face, her skin shining so, all brisk and sure and confident. And with her thoughts gleaming above her, as bright and effervescent as he'd ever seen them. Showing how she would scale the wall, break in, come down to fetch him... Scarlett's belief in her talents was absolute. It made Albert believe her too.

All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end: and which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man's conscience.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

To preach that Jesus is the true King over all kings, the only true Son of God, and therefore the only one worthy of worship is not merely a personal conviction of individual piety but is necessarily a public, political, and polemical proclamation.

and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we're standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.

The really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies.

If you have enemies, good that means you stood up for something.

You've got enemies? Good. That means you actually stood up for something in your life.

Could I make you believe something that wasn't true?' He studied her through his eyelashes. 'You could make me believe anything at all.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

Wenn die Partei es verlangt, ist ein wahrer Bolschewik bereit zu glauben, dass Schwarz Weiß ist und Weiß Schwarz.«

l'adesione alle più elementari verità dei nostri atti comporti la necessità del vigore fisico e del coraggio.

I wonder where you got that idea from? I mean, the idea that it's feeble to change your mind once it's made up. That's a wrong idea, you know. Make up your mind about things, by all means - but if something happens to show that you are wrong, then it is feeble not to change your mind, Elizabeth. Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.