Quotes About Beliefs

Well, the New Religion, as Ms. Phillips teaches, is "Secular Humanism," which, although it lacks logically consistent precepts, does contain innumerable sanctions and taboos. Of these latter, the most observed is loud and clear: do not tell the truth.

Studies seem to show that those of us who believe we must achieve in order to merit love and respect—not just be ourselves—are vulnerable to emotional troughs when our opportunities to excel are restricted.

Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be "just humans" within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values, and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism.

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else's image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.

When we hear another person's thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are. It is harder to be manipulative.

When we hear another person's thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are.

Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.

False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love.

Unfortunately, many today have come to equate morality with political correctness

Religion makes strange bedfellows.

Yet a little country in a big land has a small future. I knew that. To our north was Constantine's Alba, which we called Scotland, and Constantine feared the Saxons to our south. The Saxons and the Scots were both Christians, and Christians tell us that their god is love, and we must love one another and turn the other cheek, but when land is at stake those beliefs fly away and swords are drawn.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

The question is how to arrive at your opinions and not what your opinions are.

The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate.

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.

The bulk of the population of every country is persuaded that all marriage customs other than its own are immoral, and that those who combat this view only do so in order to justify their own loose lives.

The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.

Most modern people think of religion as a consolation, but to Epicurus it was the opposite. Supernatural interference with the course of nature seemed to him a source of terror, and immortality fatal to the hope of release from pain. Accordingly he constructed an elaborate doctrine designed to cure men of the beliefs that inspire fear.

It is clear that the most elementary condition, if thought is to be free, is the absence of legal penalties for the expression of opinions. No great country has yet reached to this level, although most of them think they have.

The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based on desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically tested beliefs.

methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate.

In spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in determining politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of error which may be fatal in practice.