Quotes about belief (2433 quotes, page 18)

“This group is composed of those for whom belief in saucers is tantamount to religion…They believe men from outer space will step in on Earth "before it's too late," put a stop to the atomic bomb threat "by their superior powers," and enforce perpetual peace "for the good of the universe"…”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

On UFO cultists, In "Flying Saucers: Fact or Farce?", San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, "People" supplement, (20 October 1963); reprinted in The Maker of Dune : Insights of a Master of Science Fiction (1987), edited by Tim O'Reilly
General sources

Men , Peace , Religion , Universe

“Actually, the specter of the Russo-German alliance is already the nightmare of every European government, however much they protest their belief in the inevitability of a Russo-German war. And what is only a nightmare today may be reality tomorrow. The two regimes will have to come together because they are similar ideologically and socially. That the European Left has not dared to admit this is understandable. By conceding that Soviet Russia is as fascist a state as Germany, they would have conceded that socialism must fail and would have abandoned themselves.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 244

War , Understanding , Reality

“It seems to me that entitlement is the key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred. The man who flayed the cat presumably felt that his employers were entitled to the cat's skin. Europeans felt that they were (and are) entitled to the land of North and South America. Slave owners clearly felt they were entitled to the labor (and the lives) of their slaves, not only in partial payment for protecting slaves from their own idleness, but also simply as a return on their capital investment. Owners of nonhuman capital today feel they, too, are entitled to the "surplus return on labor," as economists put it, as part of their reward for furnishing jobs, and to provide a return on their investment in capital. Rapists act on the belief that they are entitled to their victims' bodies, and entitled to inflict cruelty upon them. Americans act as though we are entitled to consume the majority of the world's resources, and the change the world's climate. All industrialized humans act like they're entitled to anything they want on this planet.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 105-6

World , Feeling , Cats , Change

“What is required is self-belief, most importantly. And secondly, you should be ready to listen, to be strong to acknowledge what your weakness is, and learn, improve… If you have that, then all this that you are talking about, fielding, running between wickets, they are all minor things…”

Kapil Dev (1959) Indian cricketer

In an interview on "Fielding, running between wickets" quoted in "The Rediff Cricket Interview / Kapil Dev".

Strong , Learning

“My final belief is suffering. And I begin to believe that I do not suffer.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Mi última creencia es sufrir. Y comienzo a creer que no sufro.
Voces (1943)

Suffering

“What [is] the prevailing attitude today among those who call themselves religious but vigorously advocate tolerance? There are three main options, ranging from the disingenuous Machiavellian--1. As a matter of political strategy, the time is not ripe for candid declarations of religious superiority, so we should temporize and let sleeping dogs lie in hopes that those of other faiths can gently be brought around over the centuries.--through truly tolerant Eisenhowerian "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious belief — and I don't care what it is" --2. It really doesn't matter which religion you swear allegiance to, as long as you have some religion.--to the even milder Moynihanian benign neglect--3. Religion is just too dear to too many to think of discarding, even though it really doesn't do any good and is simply an empty historical legacy we can afford to maintain until it quietly extinguishes itself sometime in the distant and unforeseeable future.It it no use asking people which they choose, since both extremes are so undiplomatic we can predict in advance that most people will go for some version of ecumenical tolerance whether they believe it or not. …We've got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence, either because they secretly believe that most of the world's population is wasting their lives in delusion (but they are too tenderhearted — or devious — to say so), or because they secretly believe that their own tradition is just such a delusion (but they fear for their own safety if they admit it)?”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

People , Lie , World , Fear

“Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren’t interested in), people don’t speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

This I Believe (1951)

People , Thinking

“One of the most natural of reactions during the war was intolerance. But the inevitable disregard for the opinions and feelings of minorities is none the less a disturbing product of war psychology. The slow and difficult advances which tolerance and liberalism have made through long periods of development are dissipated almost in a night when the necessary war-time habits of thought hold the minds of the people. The necessity for a common purpose and a united intellectual front becomes paramount to everything else. But when the need for such a solidarity is past there should be a quick and generous readiness to revert to the old and normal habits of thought. There should be an intellectual demobilization as well as a military demobilization. Progress depends very largely on the encouragement of variety. Whatever tends to standardize the community, to establish fixed and rigid modes of thought, tends to fossilize society. If we all believed the same thing and thought the same thoughts and applied the same valuations to all the occurrences about us, we should reach a state of equilibrium closely akin to an intellectual and spiritual paralysis. It is the ferment of ideas, the clash of disagreeing judgments, the privilege of the individual to develop his own thoughts and shape his own character, that makes progress possible. It is not possible to learn much from those who uniformly agree with us. But many useful things are learned from those who disagree with us; and even when we can gain nothing our differences are likely to do us no harm. In this period of after-war rigidity, suspicion, and intolerance our own country has not been exempt from unfortunate experiences. Thanks to our comparative isolation, we have known less of the international frictions and rivalries than some other countries less fortunately situated. But among some of the varying racial, religious, and social groups of our people there have been manifestations of an intolerance of opinion, a narrowness to outlook, a fixity of judgment, against which we may well be warned. It is not easy to conceive of anything that would be more unfortunate in a community based upon the ideals of which Americans boast than any considerable development of intolerance as regards religion. To a great extent this country owes its beginnings to the determination of our hardy ancestors to maintain complete freedom in religion. Instead of a state church we have decreed that every citizen shall be free to follow the dictates of his own conscience as to his religious beliefs and affiliations. Under that guaranty we have erected a system which certainly is justified by its fruits. Under no other could we have dared to invite the peoples of all countries and creeds to come here and unite with us in creating the State of which we are all citizens.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

War , People , Religion , Feeling

“[In the Qur’an] faith is still defined the same as in the Bible, a belief in what is not seen. This explains why the remaining scripture relies on the logical fallacy of the circular argument routing back to the assumed conclusion. There is nothing that is indicated by evidence, nothing that is verifiably correct, just empty assertions of impossible nonsense that you’re supposed to swallow without question simply because it says so.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)

Faith , Question

“Did I dream this belief
or did I believe this dream
how I will find relief
I grieve…”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

I Grieve
Song lyrics, City of Angels: Music from the Motion Picture (1998)

Dreams

“Political equality is not merely a folly – it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief of its existence. But the only consequences will be, that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries by birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government. They have the leisure for the task, and can give it the close attention and the preparatory study which it needs. Fortune enables them to do it for the most part gratuitously, so that the struggles of ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed. They occupy a position of sufficient prominence among their neighbours to feel that their course is closely watched, and they belong to a class brought up apart from temptations to the meaner kinds of crime, and therefore it is no praise to them if, in such matters, their moral code stands high. But even if they be at bottom no better than others who have passed though greater vicissitudes of fortune, they have at least this inestimable advantage – that, when higher motives fail, their virtue has all the support which human respect can give. They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word. Whether a few of them are decorated by honorary titles or enjoy hereditary privileges, is a matter of secondary moment. The important point is, that the rulers of the country should be taken from among them, and that with them should be the political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer. Unlimited power would be as ill-bestowed upon them as upon any other set of men. They must be checked by constitutional forms and watched by an active public opinion, lest their rightful pre-eminence should degenerate into the domination of a class. But woe to the community that deposes them altogether!”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 112, 1862, pp. 547-548
1860s

Men , Feeling , Communication , Motivation

“The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying. And there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to verify.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Weight Of Authority

Men , Truth

“I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"The End of My War", originally printed in the [London] Sunday Times (1995)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

War

“One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 16 : Markets, p. 148

Men , Imagination

“I have been brought up in the 13th century belief, and in that belief I intend to die.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

William Burges The Builder, Vol 34, 1876, p. 18: Cited in: Peter Galloway, The cathedrals of Ireland, 1992, p. 62; Also cited in Crook (2004)

“Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible, became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength.”

Rosa Parks (1913–2005) African-American civil rights activist

Quiet Strength (2000)

God , Learning , Reading , Parting

“It is not the intention of Islam to force its beliefs on people, but Islam is not merely ‘belief’. As we have pointed out, Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men. Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another. When Islam releases people from this political pressure and presents to them its spiritual message, appealing to their reason, it gives them complete freedom to accept or not to accept its beliefs.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Source: Ma'alim fi'l-Tariq (Signposts on the Road, or Milestones) (1964), Ch. 4, p. 70.

Men , People , Freedom

“Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules. The computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon fleshed this idea out further by noting that intelligence consists of specifying a goal, assessing the current situation to see how it differs from the goal, and applying a set of operations that reduce the difference. Perhaps reassuringly, by this definition human beings, not just aliens, are intelligent. We have desires, and we pursue them using beliefs, which, when all goes well, are at least approximately or probabilistically true.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 62

Truth , Intelligence , Idea , Decision

“This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. But if no conceivable evidence can shake your faith in a theistic God, then you’ve deliberately removed yourself from rational discourse. In other words, your faith has trumped science.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 120

God , Faith , Science

“It does not need much imagination to see that even in so-called advanced nations like the UK and the US, a great deal of racism and deep-seated religious prejudice fuels the propensity towards righteous war and the belief that one's own nation is always right and that "terrorism" resides only in the other.”

Anand Patwardhan (1950) Indian film director

BBC Interview, 2003 http://patwardhan.com/?page_id=656

War , Imagination

“The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't; b] he has a high IQ, but they don't.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

How to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve http://www.isteve.com/How_to_Help_the_Left_Half_of_the_Bell_Curve.htm, VDARE.com, July to September 2000

People

“On Another Country "You are not a Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you are a Communist!" - that is to say, Judd understands Marx because he presupposes in advance, that Marx is the bearer of knowledge enabling access to the truth of history, like the Christian believer who does not believe in Christ because he has been convinced by theological arguments but, on the contrary, is susceptible to theological arguments because he is already illuminated by the grace of belief.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

41
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Truth , History , Understanding , Knowledge

“Optimism is a philosophy based on the belief that basically life is good, that, in the long run, the good in life overbalances the evil.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Have a Great Day (1986), p. 14

Life , Optimism , Evil

“The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), IV. Normal Science as Puzzle-solving, p. 38.

Motivation , Problem , Time

“Men trade unionists are accused of sex privilege and prejudice … A belief in the divine right of every man to his job is not peculiar to kings and capitalists, and men in organised trades are not disposed to share these advantages with a host of women competitors.”

Barbara Drake (1876–1963) British politician

Women in Trade Unions (1920)

Women , Men , Sex

“Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still the basis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these practices because it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, or is too confused to see just why they are wrong. The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Curse of Machinery (ch. 7)

Effort , Time

“How can there be a religion which has no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no theological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo distinguishing it from antagonistic or rival religions? How can there be a religion which has no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or congregational system, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory on all its adherents, no one administration and discipline? For the Hindu priests are mere ceremonial officiants without any ecclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere interpreters of the Shastra, not the lawgivers of the religion or its rulers. How again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures? The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that varies in different castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)

Pain , Religion , Law , Communication

“Arguments hardly affect the faithful- their beliefs have an entirely different foundation.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

pg 212.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

Faith

“In order to attain perfect union, we must divest ourselves of God…The common belief about God, that He is a great Taskmaster, whose function is to reward or punish, is cast out by perfect love; and in this sense the spiritual man does divest himself of God as conceived of by most people.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Life of the Servant

Love , God , People , Sense

“One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing--lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it.”

John Barnes (1957) American science fiction writer

That Style Thingie (1998 Essay)

Beauty , Hell , Passion , Science

“Since the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, mass media has ushered in a new era of collective consciousness – a set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes that operate as a unifying force within society. Notwithstanding the danger of assimilation akin to the Borg in Star Trek, the Internet is accelerating collective consciousness and revolutionizing economy, politics, and education, among others.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Education , Star , Idea

“Faith — saving faith — whatever other definition may be framed — is best described as that act of the soul by which the whole man is given over to the guardianship of the Mediator. He who thus resigns himself to Jesus avouches two things: first, his belief that he needs a protector; secondly, his belief that Christ is just that protector which his necessities require.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 225.

Faith , Soul , Christ

“We must begin by distinguishing between visual mental imagery and visual perception: Visual perception occurs while a stimulus is being viewed, and includes functions such as visual recognition (i. e., registering that a stimulus is familiar) and identification (i. e., recalling the name, context, or other information associated with the object). Two types of mechanisms are used in visual perception: “bottom-up” mechanisms are driven by the input from the eyes; in contrast, “top-down” mechanisms make use of stored information (such as knowledge, belief, expectations, and goals). Visual mental imagery is a set of representations that gives rise to the experience of viewing a stimulus in the absence of appropriate sensory input. In this case, information in memory underlies the internal events that produce the experience. Unlike afterimages, mental images are relatively prolonged.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Stephen M. Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain." Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3-4 (2005): p. 334

Knowledge , Memory

“My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In Playboy Interviews http://books.google.com/books?id=rfoZAAAAYAAJ, Playboy Press, 1967, p. 100

Alcohol , Drink

“The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the then feelings of my mind. When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard), united to confirm me in this belief.”

Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) African abolitionist

Chap. II
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

World , Feeling , Loss , Waiting

“The minimum principle that unified the knowledge of light, gravitation, and electricity of Hamilton's time no longer suffices to relate these fundamental branches of physics. Within fifty years of its creation, the belief that Hamilton's principle would outlive all other physical laws of physics was shattered. Minimum principles have since been created for separate branches of physics… but these are not only restricted… but seem to be contrived…
A single minimum principle, a universal law governing all processes in nature, is still the direction in which the search for simplicity is headed, with the price of simplicity now raised from a mastery of differential equations to a mastery of the calculus of variations.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 442.

Law , Search , Nature , Knowledge

“The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 12 The Alleviation of Poverty

Freedom , Light , Heart

“The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard

Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 6 “London” (p. 170)

People

“The varieties of religious belief are an advantage, since all faiths are good, so far as they encourage us to lead a religious life. The more sects there are, the more opportunities there are for making a successful appeal to the divine instinct in all of us.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Life , Faith , Success

“I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away. It is, to be sure, a most exhilarating sport, but it is only a sport; and it is not to be wondered at that such as have been passionately addicted to the charming pastime should one day ask themselves whether sober reason does not advise its utter dereliction.”

Paul Morphy (1837–1884) American chess player

From Morphy's letter to Daniel Fiske, February 4, 1863 https://web.archive.org/web/20150722050734/http://www.edochess.ca/batgirl/Morphy_to_Fiske_Feb4.html

Sport , Passion , Time

“A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

During his time in South Africa from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Government of India (CWMG), Vol I, p. 150
1900s

Children

“Science is a search for truth –whatever the truth may turn out to be, even if it’s evidently not what we wanted to believe it was. In science, it doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it. This is why real science disallows faith, promising instead to remain objective, to follow wherever the evidence leads, and either correct or reject any and all errors along the way even if it challenges whatever we think we know now. But creationist organizations post written declarations of their unwavering obligation to uphold and defend their preconceived notions, declaring in advance their refusal to ever to let their minds be changed by any amount of evidence that is ever revealed. Anti-science evangelists display their statement of faith proudly on their own forums, as if admitting to a closed and dishonest mind wasn’t something to ashamed of or beg forgiveness for. They don’t want to do science. They want to un-do science! They try to segregate experimental science from historical science, ignoring the fact that both are based on empirical observations and both can be checked with testable hypotheses. Worse, they want to redefine science in general so that astrology, subjective convictions of faith, and excuses of magic can supplant the scientific method whenever necessary in defense of their beliefs. They’re only open to critical inquiry so long as that is not permitted to challenge the sacred scriptures nor vindicate any of the fields of study to which they’re already opposed. In short, everything science stands for, -or hopes to achieve- is threatened by the political agenda of these superstitious subversives.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth , Faith , Hope , Way

“Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

Death , Flowers , Knowledge , Freedom

“O majesty unspeakable and dread!
Wert thou less mighty than Thou art,
Thou wert, O Lord, too great for our belief,
Too little for our heart.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

The Greatness of God.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Art , Heart

“Faith plays an important role in an open society. Exactly because our understanding is imperfect, we cannot base our decisions on knowledge alone. We need to rely on beliefs, religious or otherwise, to help us make decisions. But we must remain open to the possibility that we may be wrong so that we can correct our mistakes. Otherwise, we are bound to be wrong.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

Faith , Understanding , Knowledge , Decision

“Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed, and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

God , Soul , Forgiveness , Christ

“We've come to this moment through patience and resolve and focused action. And that is our strategy moving forward. The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty. And the United States of America will not relent until this war is won. May God bless the people of Iraq, and may God bless America. Thank you.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Remarks on the Capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003)

God , War , People , Success

“My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On her purpose behind her books http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/young-author-makes-her-mark-in-the-world-of-children’s-literature/

Children , Books , Confidence , Passion

“All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive — you are leaking.”

Fran Lebowitz book Metropolitan Life

"Manners" (p. 6).
Metropolitan Life (1978)

God , Children , Beauty , Error

“A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office with a question that had clearly been troubling him deeply. He said to me, “I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and in evolution?” Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position that I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 270
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

God , Idea , Question , Personality

“The faction fight in the Socialist Workers Party, its conclusion, and the recent formation of the Workers Party have been in my own case, the unavoidable occasion for the review of my own theoretical and political beliefs. This review has shown me that by no stretching of terminology can I regard myself, or permit others to regard me, as a Marxist.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

As cited in: Marcel van der Linden (2007) Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 http://libcom.org/files/van_der_linden_western_marxism_and_soviet_union.pdf. p. 80
Burnham's Letter of Resignation, 1940

Fight

“We are content to accept without testing any belief that fits in with our prejudices and whose truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our desires.”

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) British philosopher

As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 204

Truth

“For at the real heart of battle for equality is a deep-seated belief in the democratic process. Equality depends not on the force of arms or tear gas but upon the force of moral right; not on recourse to violence but on respect for law and order.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, The American Promise (1965)

Law , Tear , Heart , Dependency

“Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

Speech on Islam and the West http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/a_speech_by_hrh_the_prince_of_wales_titled_islam_and_the_wes_425873846.html to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 27 October 1993.
1990s

Religion , Thinking , Time , Past

“What about [my] books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky. Then The Man in the High Castle. Martian Time-Slip (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun and The Penultimate Truth, both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra.
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and another as yet untitled Ubik]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody… and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Self Portrait" (1968), reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995), ed. Lawrence Sutin

Love , War , Truth , Books

“When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

Table Talk" p. 63
Under the Hill and Other Essays (1904)

Feeling , Literature , Study

“There is nothing compulsory. One is not asked to violate cherished beliefs or accept any of the ideas presented. Rather, a healthy skepticism is encouraged.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Robert Fripp, a student of Gurdjieff's philosophy, in An Introduction to Guitar Craft (1988). This has sometimes been quoted as a remark by Gurdjieff on the Fourth Way.
Misattributed

Idea

“The supreme principle [in Industrial Organization] has been the belief that business efficiency and the welfare of the employees are but different sides of the same problem. Character is an economic asset; and business efficiency depends not merely on the physical condition of employees, but on their general attitude and feeling towards the employer.”

Edward Cadbury (1873–1948) British businessman

Introduction, p. vii; Partly cited in: Felix Behling et al., The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism. 2015, p. 194
Experiments in industrial organization (1912)

Feeling , Business , Problem , Dependency

“Supported the belief that he was the Greek gos Zeus's son.”

Robin Lane Fox (1946) Historian, educator, writer, gardener

Source: Alexander the Great, 1973, p.214

Support

““Progressivism” is the belief that anything a Progressive wants is a fundamental Human Right which others are obligated to tolerate and pay for without complaint, because if you do complain it might create an issue and hurt someone's feelings.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

"The Republic of Emotion" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PdKXTu-er4 (24 July 2017)
2010s

Feeling , Hurt

“There is widespread belief throughout the free world that, but for American nuclear superiority, Europe would already have been reduced to satellite status and the Iron Curtain would have reached the Atlantic and the Channel. Unless a trustworthy and universal agreement upon disarmament, conventional and nuclear alike, can be reached and an effective system of inspection is established and is actually working, there is only one sane policy for the free world in the next few years. That is what we call defence through deterrents. This we have already adopted and proclaimed. These deterrents may at any time become the parents of disarmament, provided that they deter. To make our contribution to the deterrent we must ourselves possess the most up-to-date nuclear weapons, and the means of delivering them.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1955-03-01/debates/ae81a20b-68e7-42d0-8cbb-d9589f53fc0d/Defence#1896 in the House of Commons (1 March 1955)
Post-war years (1945–1955)

World , Parent , Universe , Time

“Most of our beliefs about complex organizations follow from one or the other of two distinct strategies. The closed-system strategy seeks certainty by incorporating only those variables positively associated with goal achievement and subjecting them to a monolithic control network. The open-system strategy shifts attention from goal achievement to survival and incorporates uncertainty by recognizing organizational interdependence with environment. A newer tradition enables us to conceive of the organization as an open system, indeterminate and faced with uncertainty, but subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing certainty.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. 13 (in 2011 edition)

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain , People , Feeling , Nature

“It is true that many Americans find the Commandments in accord with their personal beliefs. But we do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.”

Sandra Day O'Connor (1930) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Striking down Ten Commandments displays in two county courthouses in Kentucky in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union, 545 U.S. 844 (2005) (concurring)

Personality

“Few are the beliefs, still fewer the superstitions of to-day. We pretend to account for everything, till we do not believe enough for that humility so essential to moral discipline. But the dark creed of the fatalist still holds its ground — there is that within us, which dares not deny what, in the still depths of the soul, we feel to have a mysterious predominance. To a certain degree we controul our own actions — we have the choice of right or wrong; but the consequences, the fearful consequences, lie not with us. Let any one look upon the most important epochs of his life; how little have they been of his own making — how one slight thing has led on to another, till the result has been the very reverse of our calculations. Our emotions, how little are they under our own controul! how often has the blanched lip, or the flushed cheek, betrayed what the will was strong to conceal! Of all our sensations, love is the one which has most the stamp of Fate. What a mere chance usually leads to our meeting the person destined to alter the whole current of our life. What a mystery even to ourselves the influence which they exercise over us. Why should we feel so differently towards them, to what we ever felt before? An attachment is an epoch in existence — it leads to casting off old ties, that, till then, had seemed our dearest; it begins new duties; often, in a woman especially, changes the whole character; and yet, whether in its beginning, its continuance or its end, love is as little within our power as the wind that passes, of which no man knows whither it goeth or whence it comes.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.14. The Bride of Lammermuir — LUCY ASHTON.
Literary Remains

Love , Life , Fate , Lie

“Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me,” he said, “then I would say this lady can not exist — for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 13 “Lieutenant and Clown”

Dreams , Reality

“Without unleashing the power of life-destroying missiles or forcing obedience to a particular law, rainbows dissolve preoccupation with the predictably ordinary and encourage belief in the extra-ordinary. Such belief, such inspiration, provides much more than passive hopefulness.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. 47, Tao of the Rainbow).
Book Sources, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry (2014)

Life , Law , Hope

“She filled the pot, got out a new filter, threw the old one onto the garbage, and counted out five tablespoons of Columbian Supreme. Then she waited while the magic of modern invention turned tap water into a hot dark-brown caffeine-powered drink. It was better than any Biblical miracle and risked no beliefs.”

Jane Yolen book Briar Rose

Source: Briar Rose (1992), Chapter 8 (p. 43)

Drink , Water , Waiting

“Your father has been a man who acted according to his beliefs and certainly has been faithful to his convictions.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Letter to his Children (1965)

Faith

“Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 256.

Falseness

“There are many qualities that make a great leader but having strong beliefs, being able to stick with them through popular and unpopular times, is the most important characteristic of a great leader.”

Rudy Giuliani (1944–2001) American businessperson and politician, former mayor of New York City

Speech before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. August 30, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3613480.stm

Strong , Time

“This is the last programme in this natural history, and it's very different from all the others because it's been devoted to just one animal: ourselves. And that may have been a very misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief. No reason to suppose that man's stay on Earth should be any longer than that of the dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world, and if man were to disappear, for whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small, unobtrusive creature that would seize the opportunity and, with a spurt of evolution, take man's place. But although denying a special place in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life on Earth (1979)

World , History , Nature , Learning

“In my years past I have argued that economic sabotage was an appropriate tactic for our time. Like all strategists I have also been forced to recognize that times have changed and it is now my belief that the movements to protect earth and animals have achieved enough with this strategy to now consider an approach that does not compromise objectives, but increases the likelihood of real social change. Let our opposition who believe in violence carry the burden for its justification, but let those who believe in peace and love practice a way of life that our society sorely needs now more than ever.”

Rod Coronado (1966) Native American eco-anarchist and animal rights activist

^ Message from Rod Coronado in Prison

Love , Life , Peace , Way

“Vegetarianism proves that we’re serious about our belief in compassion and justice, that we’re mindful of our commitment, day in and day out, every time we eat. We are reminded of our belief in mercy, and we remind others. We begin to live the nonviolent vision, right here and now.”

John Dear (1959) Catholic priest from the United States

Christianity and Vegetarianism (1990)

Justice , Time

“The old theology had few if any fast colors, and it has become very faded and worn under the fierce light and intense activity of our day. Let it go; it is outgrown and outworn. What mankind will finally clothe themselves with to protect them from the chill of the great void, or whether or not they will clothe themselves at all, but become toughened and indifferent, is more than I can pretend to say. For my part, the longer I live the less I feel the need of any sort of theological belief, and the more I am content to let unseen powers go on their way with me and mine without question or distrust. They brought me here, and I have found it well to be here; in due time they will take me hence, and I have no doubt that will be well for me too.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Preface
The Light of Day (1900)

Color , Way , Feeling , Question

“Historically, "public administration" has grown in large part out of the wider field of inquiry, "political science." The history of American political science during the past fifty years is a story much too lengthy to be told here, but some important general characteristics and tendencies it has communicated to or shared with public administration must be noted.
The Secular Spirit Despite: the fact that "political science" in such forms as moral philosophy and political economy had been taught in America long before the Civil War, the present curriculum, practically in its entirety, is the product of the secular, practical, empirical, and "scientific" tendencies of the past sixty or seventy years. American students dismayed at the inadequacies of the ethical approach in the Gilded Age, stimulated by their pilgrimage to German universities, and led by such figures as J. W. Burgess, E. J. James, A. B. Hart, A. L. Lowell, and F. J. Goodnow have sought to recreate political science as a true science. To this end they set about observing and analyzing "actual government." At various times and according to circumstances, they have turned to public law, foreign institutions, rural, municipal, state, and federal institutions, political parties, public opinion and pressures, and to the administrative process, in the search for the "stuff" of government. They have borrowed both ideas and examples from the natural sciences and the other social disciplines. Frequently they have been inspired by a belief that a Science of Politics will emerge when enough facts of the proper kinds are accumulated and put in the proper juxtaposition, a Science that will enable man to "predict and control" his political life. So far did they advance from the old belief that the problem of good government is the problem of moral men that they arrived at the opposite position: that morality is irrelevant, that proper institutions and expert personnel are determining.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 22-23

Life , Men , War , Age

“I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. 301-302

Life , God , Feeling , Understanding

“Many Christians base the belief of a soul and God upon the Bible. Strictly speaking, there is no such book. To make the Bible, sixty-six books are bound into one volume. These books are written by many people at different times, and no one knows the time or the identity of any author. Some of the books were written by several authors at various times. These books contain all sorts of contradictory concepts of life and morals and the origin of things. Between the first and the last nearly a thousand years intervened, a longer time than has passed since the discovery of America by Columbus.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)

Life , God , People , Books

“The Hawthorne researchers became more and more interested in the informal employee groups which tend to form within the formal organisation of the Company, and which are not likely to be represented in the organisation chart. They became interested in the beliefs and creeds which have the effect of making each individual feel an integral part of the group and which make the group appear as a single unit, in the social codes and norms of behaviour by means of which employees automatically work together in a group without any conscious choice as to whether they will or will not co-operate. They studied the important social functions these groups perform for their members, the histories of these informal work groups, how they spontaneously appear, how they tend to perpetuate themselves, multiply, and disappear, how they are in constant jeopardy from technical change, and hence how they tend to resist innovation.
In particular, they became interested in those groups whose norms and codes of behaviour are at variance with the technical and economic objectives of the Company as a whole. They examined the social conditions under which it is more likely for the employee group to separate itself out in opposition to the remainder of the groups which make up the total organisation. In such phenomena they felt that they had at last arrived at the heart of the problem of effective collaboration, and obtained a new enlightenment of the present industrial scene.”

Fritz Roethlisberger (1898–1974) American business theorist

Cited in: Lyndall Fownes Urwick, ‎Edward Franz Leopold Brech (1961), The Making of Scientific Management: The Hawthorne investigations https://archive.org/stream/makingofscientif032926mbp#page/n191/mode/2up. p. 166-167
Management and the worker, 1939

Feeling , History , Problem , Study

“Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure. They hope to recover the unreflective faith of traditional cultures, but this is a peculiarly modern fantasy. We cannot believe as we please; our beliefs are traces left by our unchosen lives. A view of the world is not something that can be conjured up as and when we please.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Against fundamentalism ― religious and scientific (p. 18)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Disease , Faith , Hope

“It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude…. The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II

God , Truth

“If you want to understand the beliefs that are shaping global politics, read the Book of Revelation.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Review: Sacred Causes http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/28/politics by Michael Burleigh (2006-10-28)

Books , Understanding , Reading

“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 162)

Truth , Religion , Way , Idea

“I always say: I believe in Judaism more than I believe in god. [Interviewer: What do you mean by that? ] Belief is maybe a very strong word. I’d say I relate to Judaism more.”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

2015

God , Strong

“The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one – that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60
posthumous Quotes

World , Religion , Feeling , Understanding

“We can regard the vector ci as representing certain physical, social, and psychological attributes of player i himself in that it summarizes some crucial parameters of player i's own payoff function Ui as well as the main parameters of his beliefs about his social and physical environment… the rules of the game as such allow any given player i to belong to any one of a number of possible types, corresponding to the alternative values of his attribute vector c i could take… Each player is assumed to know his own actual type but to be in general ignorant about the other players' actual types.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information Played by “Bayesian” Players," 1967, p. 171; As quoted in: Mertens, Jean-Francois, and Shmuel Zamir. " Formulation of Bayesian analysis for games with incomplete information http://jeremy-chen.org/sites/default/files/files/convexset/2013_01/formulation_of_bayesian_analysis_for_games_with_incomplete_information_mertens_and_zamir_1985.pdf." International Journal of Game Theory 14.1 (1985): p. 1-2

Game

“What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, but always with a central unity of belief, is this: "I am my Father’s son, and you are my brothers." And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

Love , Men , God , Family

“Fear only goes as far as belief.”

Marcus Orelias (1993) American actor, rapper, songwriter, author and entrepreneur

Book VII
Rebel of the Underground (2013)

Fear

“The art of thinking is also the art of believing, because no human being at the present stage of civilization could safely call all his individual and social beliefs into question again or submit them to his conscience. To change all one's opinions is a mental diversion which requires leisure for its indulgence. In order to live a life of action, man must accept most of the moral, social, and religious laws which have been recognized as necessary by his predecessors.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Thinking

Life , Law , Art , Question

“People are people, and all people have emotions and biases, rarely understood: intellectual and emotional behavior don’t necessarily have an inverse correlation. Oppenheimer, as superhuman and wise as he was in so many ways, was still a human being. Depending upon the occasion he could be as human (dramatic, overwhelming, megalomaniacal, self-serving, and even downright dishonest, as his arch-rival Edward Teller was accused of being, and was) as most of us. Like most of us, depending upon the circumstances, he could change his personality and alleged beliefs at the drop of a hat.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

People , Way , Behavior , Change

“How sweet! You still believe in death… that's just so… quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

"You Ask The Questions," The Independent Review (2004-03-25)

Death , Thinking

“Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower book Mandate for Change

The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...
The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963), pp. 312-313
1960s

Wisdom , War , World , Way

“The first sentence of the actual Life of Alexander lives up to Plutarch's warning words. 'Alexander's descent, as a Heraclid on his father's side from Caranus, and as an Aeacid on his mother's side from Neoptolemus, is one of the matters which have been completely trusted.' While the Heraclid and Aeacid descent went unquestioned by ancient writers, the citation of Caranus as the founding father in Macedonia and so analogous to Neoptolemus in Molossia was not only controversial but must have been known to be controversial by Plutarch. For he was conversant with the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. which had looked to Perdiccas as the founding father in Macedonia. Caranus was inserted as a forerunner of Perdiccas in Macedonia only at the turn of the fifth century: he appeared as such in the works of fourth-century writers, such as Marsyas the Macedonian historian (FGrH 135/6 i- 14) who on my analysis was used by Pompeius Trogus (Prologue 7 'origines Macedonicae regesque a conditorc gentis Carano'). Thus the dogmatic statement of Plutarch, that Caranus was the forerunner, should have been qualified, if he had been writing scientific history. But because the statement conveyed a belief which Alexander certainly held in his lifetime it was justified in the eyes of a biographer and in the eyes of those who were more concerned with biographical background than with historical facts. If Plutarch had been challenged, he would no doubt have claimed that his belief was based on his own wide reading of authors who had studied the origins of Macedonia and provided 'completely trusted' data.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"Sources for Alexander the Great: An Analysis of Plutarch's 'Life' and Arrian's 'Anabasis Alexandrou'", p.5, Cambridge Classical Studies

Life , History , Study , Appearance

“Reform is never easy and there are municipalities fighting to maintain the status quo. They are surviving on borrowed time. We continue to fight these bureaucrats and are confident that taxation by citation will soon be coming to an end. Our efforts in Missouri are rooted in the belief that government is supposed to work for the people and not to grow government’s reach and influence by abusive schemes.”

Eric Schmitt (1975) American politician, lawyer

No more taxation by citation in Ferguson: Column https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/09/taxation-ferguson-police-reform-michael-brown-shooting-column/88445780/ (August 9, 2016)

People , Confidence , Effort , Time

“Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People , Books , World , Disease

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance.... That pure chance could be so generous and so kind.... That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time.... That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful.... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan interviewed by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. — "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan" http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ann_druyan_talks_about_science_religion/. Skeptical Inquirer 27 (6). November–December 2003.

Life , Death , People , Family

“The Imamah (religious leadership) and ummah (religious community) shed light on…the principle of progress [which society should strive towards], of reforming the relations of society, ideology, belief, life, and the pulling and driving of society and the souls, thoughts, and minds that make up this society to the best possible form. The ummah is not a society where human individuals feel a stagnant form of confort and happiness, or feel a free, carelss sense of irresponsibility and make static comfort the goal of life.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

On the Role of Leadership in the West vs Role of Leadership in Shi'ism (date of speech unknown). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0evSkdzXF_4
Speeches: On Religious Government and Islamic Leadership

Life , Feeling , Soul , Communication

“The recent trend of the Bengali film industry is to remake South Indian films. My film had a mockery about that since I don’t believe in remakes. I won’t make a film which is a copy of something. I am very firm in my beliefs, even if that causes me to lose a few producers. There are many people who are making loads of remakes. But at the same time, there are many newcomers who have original ideas, working on new things, and getting producers. It is obviously a bright side of the shoel thing.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

Interview on Calcuttatube on Remakes http://calcuttatube.com/arin-paul-exclusive-interview/1608/

People , Idea , Time

“Science is widely esteemed. Apparently it is a widely held belief that there is something special about science and its methods.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Introduction, p. xix.
What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999)

Science

“Belief in the Vedas, many means, no strict rule for worship: these are the features of the Hindu religion.”

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) Indian independence activist

Tilak, reproduced in V.D. Savarkar: Hindutva, and quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743

Religion

Quotes about belief page 18

Quotes about belief
page 18