Quotes about belief
page 6

“A belief system is nothing more than a thought you've thought over and over again.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Question, Thinking

“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. That is not the sort of belief that indicates real faith.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

48
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Faith

“The line between faith and fanaticism is a constantly shifting one,” Dr. Poblocki said. “When does belief become justification? When does right become rationale and crusade become crime?”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

Faith

“andAt the core of this desire is the belief that everything can be perfect.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Perfection

“India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. … India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

The Hindu, "The Shashi Tharoor column: A departure, fictionally", Sunday, September 16, 2001 Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/16/stories/13160675.htm 2000s

“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”

Stephen King book It

Page 1087
Source: It (1986)
Context: Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question...So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away...drive away from Derry, from memory...but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.
Context: So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe New England skyline one final time... Best not to look back. Best to believe that there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question... So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away... drive away from Derry, from memory... but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.

Life, Smile, Courage, Hope

“My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Source: The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

World, Justice, Reality

“[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Lie, Imagination, Heart

“I respect your right to hold your religious beliefs, and if they help you, I think that's great. I would, however, like to inform you that you are a raving kook.”

Scott Dikkers (1965) American comic writer

Source: You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day

Thinking, Help

“A man who can't uphold his beliefs is pathetic dead or alive - Hajime Saito”

Nobuhiro Watsuki (1970) Japanese manga artist

Dead

“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Confidence, Dependency

“Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

People

“Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,
but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief
that sustains thought and holds the world together.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

World

“Belief gets in the way of learning.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Way, Learning

“Faith, it is said, is better than belief, because belief is when someone else does the thinking.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Faith, Thinking

“Above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

Anthony Trollope book The Small House at Allington

Source: The Small House at Allington (1864), Ch. 32

Life, People, Thinking

“Then your leaders, though holding a majority in the other branch of Congress, were heroic enough to withdraw from their seats and fling down the gage of mortal battle. We called it rebellion; but we recognized it as courageous and manly to avow your purpose, take all the risks, and fight it out in the open field. Notwithstanding your utmost efforts to destroy it, the government was saved. Year by year, since the war ended, those who resisted you have come to believe that you have finally renounced your purpose to destroy, and are willing to maintain the government. In that belief you have been permitted to return to power in the two Houses.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, Speech (1879)

War, Courage, Effort, Fight

“The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)

Life, World, Feeling, Reality

“The truth “I exist” is self-evident. You may deny God by saying, “God is just a belief,” but existence cannot be refuted. That existence, that Cosmic Power, is God. God has no separate hands, legs, eyes, or body, other than our own. He moves through our hands, He walks with our legs, He sees through our eyes, and it is He who beats within the heart of each one of us.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Unity is Peace (1995)

God, Truth, Heart

“[T]he least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.”

Thomas Hughes book Tom Brown at Oxford

Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 11

Men, God, Children, Training

“Mr. Darwin begs me to say that he receives so many letters that he cannot answer them all. He considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God; but that you must remember that different persons have different definitions of what they mean by God.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VIII: "Religion", page 307 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=325&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image; letter http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-11981 from Emma Darwin (wife) to N.A. Mengden (8 April 1879) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

God, Personality

“The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Writing for the court, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

Religion, Law, Support, Personality

“We must consider not only why the classical theory of democracy appears to be in contradiction with the observed practice, but also why the many different responses to this observation, though mutually incompatible, all share the belief that democracy is the best form of political organization.”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 1, Leaders and Followers, p. 10-11

Democracy, Appearance

“Much has been said in the present debate about conciliation and the value of conciliatory measures to Ireland…Conciliatory legislation is infinitely superior; but it depends for its efficacy on the circumstances under which it is used, and on the manner in which it is applied. Deterrent legislation, if vigorous and strong, at least deters, whatever the value of that process may be. But conciliatory legislation only conciliates where there is a full belief on the part of those with whom you are dealing that you are acting on a principle of justice, and not that you are acting on motives of fear. Where there is a suspicion or a strong belief that your conciliatory measures have been extorted from you by the violence which they are meant to put a stop to, all the value of that conciliation is taken away.”

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

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1882/jun/05/motion-for-papers in the House of Lords (5 June 1882) 1880s

Fear, Justice, Motivation, Strong

“The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

The War on Religion
LewRockwell.com
2003-12-30
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul148.html
2000s, 2001-2005

“Religious ritual invariably offers a sacrificial display of commitment to supernatural agents that is materially costly and emotionally convincing. Such ritual conveys willingness to cooperate with a community of believers by signaling an open-ended promise to help others whenever there is true need. These expensive and sincere displays underscore belief that the gods are always vigilant and will never allow society to suffer those who cheat on their promises. Such a deep devotion to the in-group habitually generates intolerance toward out-groups. This, in turn, leads to constant rivalry and unending development of new and syncretic religious forms.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 16
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

God, Communication, Suffering, Help

“It is a revolution; a revolution of the most intense character; in which belief in the justice, prudence, and wisdom of secession is blended with the keenest sense of wrong and outrage, and it can no more be checked by human effort for the time than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.”

Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884) American politician and lawyer

On the secession movement in the South (1860). Reported in Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (1950), p. 387.

Wisdom, Justice, Sense, Effort

“Everyone can see that philosophy can have her belief in a millennium, but her millennarianism is not Utopian, since the Idea can help, though only from afar, to bring the millennium to pass. The only question is: Does Nature reveal anything of a path to this end? And I say: She reveals something, but very little. This great revolution seems to require so long for its completion that the short period during which humanity has been following this course permits us to determine its path and the relation of the parts to the whole with as little certainty as we can determine, from all previous astronomical observation, the path of the sun and his host of satellites among the fixed stars. Yet, on the fundamental premise of the systematic structure of the cosmos and from the little that has been observed, we can confidently infer the reality of such a revolution.
Moreover, human nature is so constituted that we cannot be indifferent to the most remote epoch our race may come to, if only we may expect it with certainty. Such indifference is even less possible for us, since it seems that our own intelligent action may hasten this happy time for our posterity. For that reason, even faint indications of approach to it are very important to us.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Eighth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Happiness, Confidence, Star, Intelligence

“The remarkable thing about the Diversity cult is that all the circumstances of the actual human world refute its tenets, wherever we look. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that there has never been an ideology so heartily and jealously embraced by all the main institutions of a society, that was at the same time so obviously at odds with the evidence of our senses. It is as if the entire Western world had committed itself to the belief that human beings can fly by flapping their arms.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009)

World, Thinking, Sense, Time

“The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the "primitive" Christianity of the holy book, i. e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about "all mankind," "human rights," and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called "Liberalism" and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, Age

“There remains the problem of Goebbels' reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: "Everybody must know what the situation is." He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) — and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

"The Characteristics of Propaganda" in Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion : New and Classic Essays (2006) edited by Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, p. 48, note 47

Truth, Lie, Problem, Success

“Shammiji is said to be India's answer to Elvis Presley, but I say that Elvis Presley is America's answer to Shammi Kapoor. The mark of a good actor is the belief with which he gives a shot and Shammiji gave his each shot with a strong belief and that makes him a great actor of all times.”

Aamir Khan (1965) Indian film actor, director, and producer of Hindi Cinema

Expressing his admiration for Shammi Kapoor http://www.planetbollywood.com/displayArticle.php?id=n061508120937

Strong, Time

“Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Author's postscript. Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/lkbak10.txt (1888)

Age

“[T]he evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe. From the anthropologist's point of view, two groups of facts militate against this belief: the wide diversity of Jews with regard to physical characteristics, and their similarity to the Gentile population amidst whom they live. Both are reflected in the statistics about bodily height, cranial index, blood-groups, hair and eye colour, etc. Whichever of these anthropological criteria is taken as an indicator, it shows a greater similarity between Jews and their Gentile host-nation than between Jews living in different countries. …The obvious biological explanation for both phenomena is miscegenation, which took different forms in different historical situations: intermarriage, large-scale proselytizing, rape as a constant (legalized or tolerated) accompaniment of war and pogrom.”

Arthur Koestler book The Thirteenth Tribe

The Thirteenth Tribe (1976).

War, History, Country

“Suppose you have two religions. Thought defines religion — the thought about the nature of God and various questions like that. Such thought is very important because it is about God, who is supposed to be supreme. The thought about what is of supreme value must have the highest force. So if you disagree about that, the emotional impact can be very great, and you will then have no way to settle it. Two different beliefs about God will thus produce intense fragmentation — similarly with thoughts about the nature of society, which is also very important, or with ideologies such as communism and capitalism, or with different beliefs about your family or about your money. Whatever it is that is very important to you, fragmentation in your thought about it is going to be very powerful in its effects.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Changing Consciousness (1991)

Money, God, Family, Religion

“The problem creationists have with evolution is not that it challenges belief in God, because it doesn’t. Their problem is that evolution, -like every other field of science- challenges the accuracy and authority of the storybooks which creationists equate to God. Consequently, they tend to reject science almost entirely, and will often take all the sciences they perceive as threatening, and lump them all together under one heading, which they then refer to as “evolution-ism”. It’s an attempt to minimize the sheer volume of sciences allied against them. This is also part of their intentionally-erected illusion of equality; a false dichotomy that if their legendary folklore isn’t the absolute authority -being both literally and completely true, then God couldn’t create or even exist any other way.”

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

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Way, Problem, Science

“It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative; it is not till the second or third thought that doubt begins. Belief is so vital and necessary that one would say the tendency was made strong at the perpetual risk of extra belief and superstition; it were better to believe too much than not enough. Hence mankind have always believed too much, as if to make sure that the anchor hold. To believe just enough, to free his mind from all cant and from all illusion, and see things just as in themselves they are, is the aim of the philosopher or of the true skeptic.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. VII: The Modern Skeptic

Nature, Strong

“Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1940s–present, Introduction to Nietzsche's The Antichrist

Men, Democracy, Nature

“For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and deservedness. Racists do racist things because they’re certain about their genetic superiority. Religious fanatics blow themselves up and murder dozens of people because they’re certain of their place in heaven as martyrs.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 6, “You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)” (p. 133)

People, Feeling

“If you look at early shamanic texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren’t any gods, and that they can’t give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don’t burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It’s like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we’ll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said “The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production” didn’t take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Love, God, People, Dogs

“But my present point is a much wider one. What we need, in order to feel at home in the world, is certainly not a belief that it was made for us. We are at home in this world because we were made for it. we have develped here, on this planet, and are adapted to live here. Our emotional constitution is part of that adaptation. We are not fit to live anywhere else (the possibility, such as it is, of surviving briefly, and at ruinous expense in space-craft and the like is just parasitical; it depends on extending the conditions we are used to into a few bizairre corners, not on our being able to live in other conditions.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

World, Feeling, Home, Parting

“Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan 1980s and later

Men, People, World, Family

“Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.”

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

Voltaire (1916)

Wisdom, Law, Feeling, Imagination

“The fact that our government shouts "death sentence" and the National Commission for Women ex-chairperson follows it up by calling for castration of rapists just shows a warped belief in a weird linkage between increasingly barbaric and sensational punishments and greater liberation for womankind. If only they'd look at mundane nitty-gritties.”

Flavia Agnes (1947) Indian activist and lawyer

On the low conviction rate in rape cases in India, as quoted in " Rape & Punishment: Will death penalty deter rapists, or make conviction even tougher? http://www.outlookindia.com/article/rape-amp-punishment/206690" Outlook India (14 December 1998)

Death, Women

“Rabbi Daniel Lapin: Here's a really blunt question: would the world be a better or a worse place if a billion Muslims became evangelical Christians tomorrow?
Penn: [long pause] Everything else being equal, I think "yes".
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: Then we agree.
Penn: The argument is made by me that the celebration of faith, the glorification of faith, and faith being defined as The Bible kind of does as belief without proof, is not something that I feel is good to celebrate. To answer the question about evil, I always find that evil takes responsibility away. I want to have—whether it’s me or whether it's a criminal—I want to have full responsibility of my mistakes. And I think when you have this image, whether it's the Disney image of devil Pluto and angel Pluto on your shoulders, pulling you one direction or another, I think that idea of evil is an idea that is anti-responsibility.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

The Glenn Beck Program, April 12, 2013. Edited, including omission of some non-germane remarks. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJk0XFlErTA 2010s

World, Faith, Angels, Feeling

“I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/43/mode/1up p. 43

Country

“Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/godzilla-1998 of Godzilla (26 May 1998) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Faith, Intelligence, Horse

“A: "Your objection to the self-evident has no validity. There is no such thing as disagreement. People agree about everything."
B: "That’s absurd; people disagree constantly, and about all kinds of things."
A: "How can they? There’s nothing to disagree about; no subject matter. After all, nothing exists."
B: "Nonsense. All kinds of things exist, you know that as well as I do."
A: "That’s one. You must accept the existence axiom, even to utter the term “disagreement.” But to continue, I still maintain that disagreement is unreal. How can people disagree when they are unconscious beings who are unable to hold any ideas at all?"
B: "Of course people hold ideas. They are conscious beings. You know that."
A: "There’s another axiom, but even so, why is disagreement about axioms a problem? Why should it suggest that one or more of the parties is mistaken? Perhaps all of the people who disagree about the very same point are equally, objectively right."
B: "That’s impossible. If two ideas contradict each other, they can’t both be right. Contradictions can’t exist in reality. After all, A is A."
Existence, consciousness, identity are presupposed by every statement and by every concept, including that of "disagreement." … In the act of voicing his objection, therefore, the objector has conceded the case. In any act of challenging or denying the three axioms, a man reaffirms them, no matter what the particular content of this challenge. The axioms are invulnerable.
The opponents of these axioms pose as defenders of truth, but it is only a pose. Their attack on the self-evident amounts to the charge. "Your belief in an idea doesn't necessarily make it true; you must prove it, because facts are what they are independent of your beliefs." Every element of this charge relies on the very axioms that these people are questioning and supposedly setting aside.”

Leonard Peikoff (1933) Canadian-American philosopher

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) ; Dialogue used to show that existence, conciousness, identity, and non-contradiction are axioms, using A as a defender of the axioms, and B as an opponent of the axioms,
1990s

People, Truth, Idea, Question

“in our society at all levels not only uneducated but educated as well are dominated by superstitions of various kinds. The superstitions of the educated are only more sophisticated than those of the uneducated. So one needs to introduce real knowledge in place of superstitious beliefs. You need to explain to people believing in superstitious ideas that the ideas are not correct and this can be verified experimentally. When doing science popularization you have to express some facts of the real universe or the real world to the person who is not willing to believe in it and if you express it in a very pedantic way or say to the person that you are a fool, you should not believe this then it is not good because then he will believe in his superstitions even more. So you have to persuade him to think for himself, you don’t tell him what to believe but you ask him to try this experiment and see what is the reality. So that way you may be able to convince the person.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People, World, Education, Fools

“If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on, — if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the "Sciences", and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies — their name is legion — and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupefying ballast — the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VI

Love, God, People, World

“If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs — rethinking the world isn't an option.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/the_man_with_two_duhs_in_his_n.php
The man with two 'duh's in his name
Pharyngula
2008-04-03

World, Nature

“Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and non-adaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Abstract
"Organizations as action generators," 1983

People, Behavior, Problem, Sense

“Three grossly different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abominations of the body - the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 13

Alcohol, Family, Religion, Suicide

“Even more than religious belief, acceptance or denial of evolution is a test of character. For if you deny evolution is true, you are either pandering to the public even though you know better (showing that you’re ambitious but lack character), are truly ignorant of the facts (which means you can’t be trusted to be informed about crucial issues), or are a flat-out creationist”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

showing that you’re batshit crazy " Lying and/or ignorant Republican candidates still refuse to accept evolution https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/lying-andor-ignorant-republican-candidates-still-refuse-to-accept-evolution/" May 7, 2015

“We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

God, People, Question

“When man was first in the jungle, he took care of himself. When he entered a societal group, controls were necessarily imposed. But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is the article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49 (1972)
Judicial opinions

World, Faith, Idea, Freedom

“One of my central missions in politics is to encourage the people of Scotland to share a restored belief in themselves. A sense of the possible. A sense of ambition. A restless eye for national advancement.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

St Andrew's Day (November 30, 2007)

People, Sense

“. Here [ Guernsey ] people bath among the rocks which serve as cabins, since there's nothing else; nothing is more attractive than this mixture of women and men crowded on these rocks. One would belief oneself in a landscape by Watteau rather than in the real world. So I'll have a source of real and graceful motives which I will be able to make use of. Some enchanting bathing-costumes... Nothing is more amusing when one is strolling through these rocks, than to surprise young girls getting ready to bathe... Despite the small number of things that I'll be able to bring back [to Paris], I hope to be able to give you an idea of these charming things.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

In Renoir's letter to Paul Durand-Ruel, from Guernsey, 27 Sept, 1883; as cited in 'Renoir in Guernsey' (in 1883), text by John House http://museums.gov.gg/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=81297&p=0, Guernsey museum 1880's

Women, Men, People, World

“The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

p.190 https://books.google.com/books?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:039300743X&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwioupWF54_XAhUN6mMKHQdhBjcQ6AEIJjAA 1930s, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" https://books.google.com/books/about/New_Introductory_Lectures_on_Psycho_anal.html?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false (1933)

Life

“The spirit of our National Socialist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy if there is to be a third Reich at all! Deeply rooted in organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals. violating the deepest levels of our being! We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

Source: " Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future https://books.google.com/books?id=fG_oAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA87", by Gregor Strasser - (1926 June 15)

Life, People, Lie, Democracy

“Perhaps I was too dumb, or just too interested in cricket or in girls, to ask myself any questions about religion. If I had not been, I might have, inevitably, asked myself questions that have troubled skeptics and unbelievers for as long as men and women have been skeptical or have lacked belief. "Is there really no God? And if there really is no supernatural dimension to the universe, why have so many people throughout history and in so many different cultures thought there was?"”

Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) British theatre director (born 1934)

Episode one: "Shadows of Doubt".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)

Women, Men, God, People

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men, Age, World, Faith

“If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that attracts to yourself events that - again - will confirm your beliefs.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 833, Page 163
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981)

World, Way, Search, Sense

“You are not your cluster of memorized ideas about yourself. Awareness of this dissolves both the cluster and the belief that others can control you. If you have a self-image of being a desirable person, others can control you by flattering it, but can they control if you have no such image?”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Esoteric Mind Power

Idea, Personality

“Lord Hailsham: But to try to turn it into a party issue, is really beyond belief contemptible.
Robert McKenzie: Do you feel that the others that have spoken out, the Bishops, The Times and so on, have tried to turn it into a party issue?
Hailsham: I think you have!”

Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (1907–2001) British judge, politician, life peer and Cabinet minister

Conclusion of the same interview.

Feeling, Thinking, Time

“I cannot give a stronger proof of the perils which I think surrounds us, than to say that I shall feel it my duty to stop the wheels of Government if I can, in a way which can only be justified by an extraordinary crisis…I do not mean to threaten outbreaks—that the starving masses will come and pull down your mansions; but I say that you are drifting on to confusion without rudder or compass. It is my firm belief that within six months we shall have populous districts in the north in a state of social dissolution. You may talk of repressing the people by the military, but what military force would be equal to such an emergency? …I do not believe that the people will break out unless they are absolutely deprived of food; if you are not prepared with a remedy, they will be justified in taking food for themselves and their families…Is it not important for Members for manufacturing districts on both sides to consider what they are about? We are going down to our several residences to face this miserable state of things, and selfishness, and a mere instinctive love of life ought to make us cautious. Others may visit the continent, or take shelter in rural districts, but the peril will ere long reach them even there. Will you, then, do what we require, or will you compel us to do it ourselves? This is the question you must answer.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1842/jul/08/distress-of-the-country in the House of Commons (8 July 1842) against the Corn Laws. 1840s

Love, Life, People, Family

“The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe, There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Carter slams Georgia's 'evolution' proposal, 30 January, 2004 http://edition.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/01/30/georgia.evolution/ Post-Presidency

God, Faith, Star, Universe

“The creeds are not changing as rapidly as the beliefs of the people, nor as rapidly as most men of progressive mind desire”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Defence at his Heresy Trial

Men, People, Change

“What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

Source: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), pp.27, "Totalitarian Laughter"

People, Game, Laughter, Parting

“Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Wafa Sultan (1958) American psychistrist

Cited in: John M. Broder. " For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0" in The Saturday Profile, New York Times, March 11, 2006 Interview on Al Jazeera TV, 2006

People

“We have turned our backs on God, and given Him lip-service by maintaining a belief in His existence and at the same time embracing that which is abhorrent to Him; things such as homosexual marriage, abortion, adultery, fornication, pornography, lying, theft and blasphemy. Few have any fear of God, which the Bible says is the ‘beginning’ of wisdom. A wise man once said, ‘Most I fear God. Next I fear him who fears Him not.’ When someone doesn’t fear God, they give themselves to evil.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

As quoted in Mass Murder 'Normal' in World without God' http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/mass-murder-normal-in-world-without-god/, Worldnutdaily (2012-07-23)

Wisdom, God, Marriage, Fear

“If this is nothing more than a stipulation about how we ought to use the term ‘ideological’, then perhaps it will do no harm. But if it is a proposal about how historians ought to set about the business of explaining beliefs, then it seems to me fatal for just the reasons I have sought to give. It refuses to recognise that one of the reasons why someone may hold a certain belief is that there is good evidence in favour of it, that it fits well with their other beliefs, and so on – in a word, that it is rational for them to hold it. If we refuse to speak in these terms, we deprive ourselves of an indispensable means of identifying the most appropriate lines of enquiry to follow in any given case.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

Business

“Most beliefs about nature and man, which were not founded on scientific observation, have served directly or indirectly religious and social interests, and hence they have been protected by force against the criticisms of persons who have the inconvenient habit of using their reason.”

J. B. Bury book A History of Freedom of Thought

p.17 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t71v5g25n;view=1up;seq=21 A History of Freedom of Thought (1913)

Nature, Personality

“If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.
Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.”

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

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference

Question, Nature, Universe, Help

“One, the people in charge wanting to give up control. This tends to eliminate some 80 percent of businesspeople. Two, a profound belief that humankind will work toward its best version, given freedom; that would eliminate the other 20 percent.”

Ricardo Semler (1959) Brazilian businessman

Strategy+business: "Ricardo Semler Won't Take Control" https://www.strategy-business.com/article/05408?gko=3291c (29 November 2005)

People, Freedom

“Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama's critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, February 7, 2014, "President Obama's Magic Words and Numbers" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-president-obamas-magic-words-and-numbers/2014/02/07/220fbc04-8f76-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html at washingtonpost.com. 2010s

People, World, Sincerity

“In the Islamic world, from the beginning, Islam was the primary basis of both identity and loyalty. We think of a nation subdivided into religions. They think, rather, of a religion subdivided into nations. It is the ultimate definition, the prime definition and the one that determines, as I said, not only identity, but also basic loyalty. And this is quite independent of religious belief. In Islam, there isn't or rather, there wasn't until recently any such thing as the church, in the Christian sense of that word. The mosque is a place of worship. It's a building, a place of worship and study. And in that sense, it is the equivalent of the church. But in the sense of an institution with a hierarchy and its own laws and usages, there was no such thing in Islam until very recently. And one of the achievements of the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been to endow an Islamic country for the first time with the equivalents of a pope, a college of cardinals, a bench of bishops and, above all, an inquisition. All these were previously unknown and nonexistent in the Islamic world.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

World, Religion, Law, Thinking

“There certainly seems to be a strong correlation between religion and insanity. I’ve read a few papers comparing the logical and psychological aptitude of strong believers vs those with little or no faith at all, and the trends there all seem to be in our favor, but not to the point that religion causes the disorder. I think certain mental disorders can prompt religious beliefs, but that’s a different claim. I think religion provides a haven to conceal quite a lot of cognitive and psychiatric disorders as well as some social dysfunctions. But that doesn’t mean religion is a mental illness, regardless how accurate analogies of the God virus might be. I think there are circumstances when religion can be treated as a psychological condition, especially when it is the result of detrimental conditioning, but I wouldn’t confuse that with a psychiatric malady, which (I think) would have to be physiological/chemical.”

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

"How crazy is religion?" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2014/05/07/how-crazy-is-religion/, Patheos (May 7, 2014) Patheos

God, Faith, Religion, Thinking

“Let us respect each other and avoid causing unnecessary hurt to those with beliefs and faiths different from ours.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

( Pacific Magazine http://www.pacificmagazine.net). Reaction to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, 7 February 2006

Faith, Hurt

“All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

Nature, Dependency

“I… propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Truth, Hope, Time

“The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not. This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. The Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its "unhallowed perversion" by a civil magistrate. Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. The Founders knew that only a few years after the Book of Common Prayer became the only accepted form of religious services in the established Church of England, an Act of Uniformity was passed to compel all Englishmen to attend those services and to make it a criminal offense to conduct or attend religious gatherings of any other kind-- a law which was consistently flouted by dissenting religious groups in England and which contributed to widespread persecutions of people like John Bunyan who persisted in holding "unlawful [religious] meetings... to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom...."”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

And they knew that similar persecutions had received the sanction of law in several of the colonies in this country soon after the establishment of official religions in those colonies. It was in large part to get completely away from this sort of systematic religious persecution that the Founders brought into being our Nation, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights with its prohibition against any governmental establishment of religion.
Writing for the court, Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

People, Books, Faith, Religion

“The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard

Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 3 “The River: Swifford Fair” (p. 75)

Life, Pleasure, Truth, Fear

“Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Love, People, Change, Past

“The absence of theistic belief…”

Joseph McCabe (1867–1955) British writer

Defining the word "atheism", in A Rationalist Encyclopedia (1950).

“One of our core beliefs was that significant art could be made by anyone, anywhere and anytime. You didn’t have to live and work in New York City to be an artist. It was in line with the philosophy of Outsider art and movements for artistic "localism."”

Joe Lewis (artist) (1953) American photographer

Walter Robinson. " Joe Lewis: Clairvoynace http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/robinson/robinson8-16-07.asp" at artnet.com, 2015.

Art

“The liberal program aims to dissolve 'the constitution of man' in the service of sexual sameness. It is predicated on the imbecilic belief that biology is incidental, and that men and women are essentially interchangeable.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Are Liberal Pervs Sexually Obsessed With Refugees?" https://constitution.com/are-liberal-pervs-sexually-obsessed-with-refugees/, Constitution.com, April 27, 2018. 2010s, 2018

Women, Men

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

“What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism, pp. 60–61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts (December 1906) and at Columbia University, New York City, (January 1907)
1900s

Truth, History, Nature, Time

“This article was written for those who believe that the spectrum of opinion is more like a circle than a straight line. It was written for those who believe that each of the different perspectives on terrorism has something to add to the whole. In this view, coming up with a solution to terrorism is not a matter of adopting "correct" political beliefs. It is, rather, a matter of learning to listen – really, listen – to everyone in the circle of humankind. And to take their insights into account. For everyone has a true and unique perspective on the whole. Fifteen years ago the burning question was, How radical are you? Hopefully someday soon the question will be, How much can you synthesize? How much do you dare to take in?”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 19, "Twenty-eight Ways of Looking at Terrorism," pp. 167–68.

Question, Learning

“Later, every form of religious belief seemed absurd to me, and death was as if disfigured. […] Today I would never say: he has gone away. I’ve lost the sense of the crossing over: nothing goes up to heaven, we don’t move to another world, we don’t return, we aren’t reborn. We remain definitively immobile; death is the last point on the segment of life that has chanced to be ours.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

"Elena Ferrante: ‘My belief in some kind of beyond, acquired during childhood, has faded’" https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/10/elena-ferrante-life-after-death, The Guardian, 10 February 2018.

Life, Death, World, Sense

“I don’t think we should get to the state in this or any other country that if someone has a faith they are regarded as curious. Given that [Blair] had that framework – and it’s not for me to question his personal beliefs – then why on earth was he employing folk who so clearly didn’t?”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Faith, Question, Thinking, Personality

“A major component of the western myth is the belief that myth is a primitive and mistaken way of thinking about the world that has been replaced by science. Commonly, the word “myth” is now used to mean an illusion or a lie… Enlightened moderns are accustomed to looking at the queer beliefs of the Mayas or the Tassaday and seeing them as mythical. But we look on our own belief systems as rational and rooted in the realities of politics and economics. As Joseph Campbell says: “Myth is other people’s religion.””

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 20

People, Lie, World, Religion

“Music is a healing force and we have the privilege of sharing it. It's an awesome responsibility. It has to be something that says something from you. It's a beautiful way to live your life. Whether you end up doing it for a business or just end up singing for your kids, teaching other people to do music, or doing therapy, go forward with a lot of belief, because it's such an amazing way to live your life.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

commencement address to 2007 graduating class at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA
www.u2france.com (May 13, 2007)
2007, 2008

Life, People, Beauty, Music

“The belief that women are discriminated against in the workplace reinforces a couple's tendency to have the woman stay at home. It is the tendency for women to stay at home that makes the workplace value her less. then, shortly after she is married, it begins to make sense for her to move for her husband's career, not for her husband to move for her career. Conversely, it makes sense for them to invest in his medical, law, or engineering degree--rather than hers… ironically, then, a reality has been created from a false reality. And, ironically, women's careers are hurt via comments meant to prod a society into helping women's careers. The road to hell is paved…”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 145.

Women, Law, Home, Hell

“Ours is not only a fortunate people, but a very commonsensical people, with vision high, but their feet on the earth, with belief in themselves and faith in God. Whether enemies threaten from without or menaces arise from within, there is some indefinable voice saying, '. Here is the sample of liberty no storms may shake. Here are the altars of freedom no factions shall destroy. It was American in conception, American in its building. It shall be American in the fulfillment. Factional once, we are all American now. And we mean to be all Americans to all the world.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1920s, The American Soldier (1920)

God, People, World, Faith

“The Citadel cherishes the belief that the more hardship endured by the young man, the higher the quality of the person who graduates from the system. The Citadel devised a formula years ago to improve the quality of men who walked through her gates. The formula begins with the plebe system. One thing is certain. The plebe system is calculated to be, and generally succeeds in being, a nine month journey through hell. The freshman is beaten, harassed, ridiculed, and humiliated by the upperclassmen who concur and believe in the traditions of the school. Under the pressure of this system, the freshman, in theory, becomes hardened to the savage hardships of the world. Life is tough, the system says, and we are going to make life so tough for you this year that when your marriage dissolves, your child dies unexpectedly, or your platoon is decimated in a surprise attack, you can never say The Citadel didn't prepare you for the worst in life.”

Pat Conroy book The Boo

Source: The Boo (1970), p. 6-7

Life, Men, Marriage, World

“But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VIII: "Religion", pages 308-309 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=326&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image Francis Darwin calls these "extracts, somewhat abbreviated, from a part of the Autobiography, written in 1876". The original version is presented below. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887) Variant: p>But I was very unwilling to give up my belief;—I feel sure of this for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.And this is a damnable doctrine.Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.</p

Life, God, Books, Law

“If man is created by an external source, then he must belong to that source and not to himself. According to Buddhism, man is responsible for everything he does. Thus Buddhists have no reason to believe that man came into existence in the human form through any external sources. They believe that man is here today because of his own action. He is neither punished nor rewarded by anyone but himself according to his own good and bad action. In the process of evolution, the human being came into existence. However, there are no Buddha-words to support the belief that the world was created by anybody. The scientific discovery of gradual development of the world-system conforms with the Buddha's Teachings.”

K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera (1919–2006) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

"The God-Idea"
What Buddhists Believe (1993)

World, Support

“What is all Knowledge too, but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

On History.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
Variant: What is all Knowledge too, but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials.

History, Knowledge, Passion

Quotes about belief page 6

Quotes about belief
page 6