Quotes About Beliefs

I always want to tell these young idealists that the world is not as dangerous as many in the older generation want them to believe...The [people] for whom I feel the greatest sadness are the ones who choke on their beliefs, who never act on their ideals, who never know the state of struggle in a decent cause, and never know the thrill of even partial victories.

liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail.

Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.

Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place.

I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.

the purpose of Genesis was to refute pagan beliefs involving worship of the sun, other luminaries, or pagan deities. In other words, Genesis is allegedly teaching us not to worship the sun but our true God who made the sun. (As

Whatever you experience in your life is really but the out picturing of your own thoughts and beliefs.

How could you determine a man's intention if you didn't speak his language or share his beliefs? She'd happily embarked on a study of ancient Egyptian religion but had no curiosity about Islam, which seemed an amalgam of oddities and borrowings. She felt with conviction what she'd written home more than once--that Egypt would be an exquisite country if not for the Egyptians who lived there.

Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.

It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul.

The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.

Even the Internet, which was supposed to deliver unprecedented cultural diversity ad democratic communication, has become an echo chamber where people see and hear what they already believe.

But in a few years, as part of their effort to push Jews out of German public life, the Nazis would attempt to puah them out of the German church too. That these "non-Aryans" had publicly converted to the Christian faith meant nothing, since the lens through which the Nazis saw the world was purely racial. One's genetic makeup and ancestral bloodline were all that mattered; one's most deeply held beliefs counted for nothing.

Bonhoeffer was no mere academic. For him, ideas and beliefs were nothing if they did not relate to the world of reality outside one's mind.

Ideas and beliefs are nothing if they did not relate to the world of reality outside one's mind.

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

The conservatives running the government have always been against the exploration of Mars. What we've found goes against their religious beliefs.

I thought of myself as a moderate Republican—liberal on social issues,

There are almost invariably unbridgeable inconsistencies in the left's publicly stated positions that are at war with their actual fundamental principles. Your goal is to make the left admit once and for all what they believe about policy by exposing those inconsistencies.

The goal: to convince young people that while they aren't overtly racist, they hold secret racist beliefs that can only be cleansed by embracing the leftist agenda.

The universities have instituted a new right: the right not to be offended. When tolerance of every sort of behavior reigns, those who believe in standards and rules are destined for castigation.

Only the left sees terms like flag-waver, jingoist, and super-patriot as insults. Patriotism, in their view, is bad. They don't believe this, because they're globalists.

Young liberals call for tolerance because they want to promulgate a lifestyle, in other words; young conservatives call for tolerance because they actually believe in tolerance, even of lifestyle choices with which they disagree. In return, young conservatives demand that their opponents mind their own business. Tolerance is a moral touchstone, then, for young Americans on both the left and the right, but for different reasons.