Quotes About Conviction

Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.

I don't want to impose a retrospective clarity of will on what had certainly been months immersed in a flailing muddle, but if there isn't some truth to the narratives of progress with which we sometimes try to frame our lives, however rooted in desperate delusion, we'd never be able to speak them, certainly not silently to ourselves, with any conviction.

Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.

1. Man is a MORAL animal. 2. You can get human beings to do anything — IF you convince them it is moral. 3. You can convince human beings anything is moral.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

The belief in a thing makes it happen.

Worth dying for. Worth killing for. Worth going to hell for.Amen.

She had a deeper conviction that procedures and attitudes could be evolved that extracted the poison from disagreement. She had a fantasy that there was always a formulation which could give painless compromise, if one only had the time.

I also happened to sincerely believe in my father's message, though "believe" is perhaps the wrong word. Rather, I had not yet begun to question my indoctrination.

When Bible-believing fundamentalist Reformed Protestants go on vacation in Roman Catholic Italy, surrounded by unbelievers, they must witness to the truth.

We see God and the devil making fools of each other, and we nurture in ourselves the absolutely unshakable conviction that both of them are drunk.

MRS GABOR (to Mr. Gabor): You have to be a man to be so blinded by doctrine that you cannot see what is staring you in the face!

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.

I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them." [ Letter to Herbert Putnam ; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world ; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171]

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.

A fanatic is one who sticks to his guns whether they're loaded or not.

Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.

Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and would-be philosopher, needed such boring heavy tomes full of bloodless characters to make her case. Her main point was that we are unalloyed individualists, but she had to work hard to convince us, because deep down everyone knows that this is not who or what we are. Rather than a description of our species, Rand offered a counterintuitive ideological construct.

entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence.

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.

Neither stubborn courage nor fine slogans are enough.

only those minds can be convinced of the truth which are themselves capable of sharing in its lofty quality.

Passion makes one persuasive.