“I’m delighted to hear someone make the claim that there is moral progress because it can be such a incendiary thing to say, and its something that I say and deeply believe in.”
Beyond Belief conference (November 2006)
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Susan Neiman 11
American academic 1955Related quotes
"The Scarlet Z, for Zombie (Reaganite)" https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-scarlet-z-etc/ (15 August 2018), by Jay Nordlinger, National Review Online
2010s, 2014
As quoted in Conversations with Edward Albee (1988) by Philip C. Kolin, p. 176
Context: I survive almost any onslaught with a shrug, which must appear as arrogance, but really isn't because I'm not an arrogant person. When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions — that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. That's all. And then you go about your business, assuming you'd be the first to know if your talent has collapsed.
I don't think I've been a commercial playwright ever. By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing — which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring. I very seldom get it anyway, and then it's accidental when I do. … So I write those things that interest me.
"The Emotional Factor"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.
Often paraphrased as "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Context: You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or even mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.
In an interview with Kara Swisher as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher (July 18, 2018), Recode.
But if you don’t know, you don’t know. That’s what an ignoramus is. If you have an open mind close it, would you please, before you destroy yourself. Close it.
"Scripture Is Sufficient" https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/80-420/scripture-is-sufficient (1 March 2015), Grace to You
2010s
“So I went over there and, I’m delighted to say, the play flopped. I hated New York. I loathed it.”
After the failure of the broadway run of Boeing-Boeing.
New York Times obituary 9 February 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/arts/television/10carmichael.html