Quotes about believer

page 100

The Sense of Wonder (1965)
Context: I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.

Discussion held at MIT on (4 May 1998) http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/science_fiction/transcripts/jms_jablokov_index.html.
Context: I think it behooves us to treat our characters' beliefs with some measure of respect, whatever he believes in.
I mean I'm an atheist myself, but I don't have to believe in Minbari to write about Minbari. I think if that person is a religious character, then you have to treat them with integrity and deal with them properly. As a result, this show is very popular with a lot of religious folks.

"What Must We Do To Be Saved?" (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section XI, "What Do You Propose?"
Context: I do not believe in forgiveness as it is preached by the church. We do not need the forgiveness of God, but of each other and of ourselves. If I rob Mr. Smith and God forgives me, how does that help Smith? If I, by slander, cover some poor girl with the leprosy of some imputed crime, and she withers away like a blighted flower and afterward I get the forgiveness of God, how does that help her? If there is another world, we have got to settle with the people we have wronged in this. No bankrupt court there. Every cent must be paid.

The Better Part (1901)
Context: I believe that brutality tends to defeat itself. Prizefighters die young, gourmands get the gout, hate hurts worse the man who nurses it, and all selfishness robs the mind of its divine insight, and cheats the soul that would know. Mind alone is eternal. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps. My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist.

Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), IV
Context: One of the most suggestive episodes recounted in the Bible is that of a prophet's attempt — the only attempt of the kind on the record, I believe — to count up the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him and asked what he was doing so far away from his job. He said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the Remnant had been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to; """"and as for your figures on the Remnant,"""" He said, """"I don't mind telling you that there are seven thousand of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are.""""

George Boole (1854), "Address at Cork" as cited in: R. H. Hutton, " Professor Boole http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA165," (1866), p. 165; Also cited in: Boole, George. Studies in Logic and Probability. 2002. Courier Dover Publications. p. 451
1850s
Context: Perhaps it is in the thought that there does exist an Intelligence and Will superior to our own,—that the evolution of the destinies of our species is not solely the product either of human waywardness or of human wisdom; perhaps, I say, it is in this thought, that the conception of humanity attains its truest dignity. When, therefore, I use this term, I would be understood to mean by it the human race, viewed in that mutual connexion and dependence which has been established, as I firmly believe, for the accomplishment of a purpose of the Divine mind... One eminent instance of that connexion and dependence to which I have referred is to be seen in the progression of the arts and sciences. Each generation as it passes away bequeaths to its successor not only its material works in stone and marble, in brass and iron, but also the truths which it has won, and the ideas which it has learned to conceive; its art, literature, science, and, to some extent, its spirit and morality. This perpetual transmission of the light of knowledge and civilisation has been compared to those torch-races of antiquity in which a lighted brand was transmitted from one runner to another until it reached the final goal. Thus, it has been said, do generations succeed each other, borrowing and conveying light, receiving the principles of knowledge, testing their truth, enlarging their application, adding to their number, and then transmitting them forward to coming generations

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)
Context: Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws—but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state—but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

"I still have'nt found what I'm looking for"
Lyrics, The Joshua Tree (1987)
Context: I believe in the Kingdom come, then all the colours will bleed into one. Bleed into one. But yes I'm still running

Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
Context: Law is the continuous manifestation of God's presence — not reason for believing him absent.
Great confusion arises from our using the same word law in two totally distinct senses … as the cause and the effect. It is said that to "explain away" everything by law is to enable us to do without God.
But law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. Law brings us continually back to God instead of carrying us away from him.

Speculation on motives and desires of politically active widows which caused public controversy, p. 103, quoted in "Coulter lambastes 9/11 widows in new book" at MSNBC (7 June 2006) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13186261/.
2006, Godless : The Church of Liberalism (2006)
Context: These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.

Interview with Laura Knoy, New Hampshire Public Radio (5 November 2003)
Context: I don't have labels. I believe in human beings, I believe in a strong national security, I believe in maximizing freedom... I can give you a whole list of things i'm for, but I believe in solving problems. I guess, more than anything else, I'm a pragmatist with strong beliefs in people.

"The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean" (1940)
Context: Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
Context: The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

Fire from Heaven (1969)

Dedication, later published as "A Prayer in Time of War"
A Belgian Christmas Eve (1915)
Context: p>The fool hath said … The fool hath said
And we, who deemed him wise,
We, who believed that Thou wast dead,
How should we seek Thine eyes?How should we seek to Thee for power,
Who scorned Thee yesterday?
How should we kneel in this dread hour?
Lord, teach us how to pray.</p

"What I Believe" in The Forum 84 (September 1930), p. 139; some of these expressions were also used separately in other Mencken essays.
1930s
Context: I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty and the democratic form is as bad as any of the other forms.
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech — alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I —But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=807&chapter=88152&layout=html&Itemid=27 (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
1810s
Context: Like a dropsical man calling out for water, water, our deluded citizens are clamoring for more banks, more banks. The American mind is now in that state of fever which the world has so often seen in the history of other nations. We are under the bank bubble, as England was under the South Sea bubble, France under the Mississippi bubble, and as every nation is liable to be, under whatever bubble, design, or delusion may puff up in moments when off their guard. We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce nothing; that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher’s stone which is to turn everything into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his Maker, “in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.”

Have A Nice Day
Joy To The World (1971)

Review of Selected Essays http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13783 by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)
Context: Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)
Context: But I really, since I exist, at all, I believe that it's possible for people... I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic... That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that there's to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe in it. And I refuse, like, since I'm still alive and done the things I've done and seen things and understood things as far as I have, and I am alive, I mean physically intact. When I shouldn't be, according to medical reports and so forth. I mean I should be, not here. That's all there is to it. So the magic's working and it's a rare situation.

Black Boy (1945)

From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)
Context: The method of Marx and Engels consists precisely in a search for the link which exists between what men think, desire, say and believe for themselves and what they are, what they do. This link always exists. It can be explored in two directions. On the one hand, the historian or the man of action can proceed from ideas to men, from consciousness to being - i. e. towards practical, everyday reality - bringing the two into confrontation and thereby achieving archieving criticism of ideas by action and realities. That is the direction which Marx and Engels nearly always followed in everything they wrote; and it is the direction which critical and constructive method must follow initially if it is to take a demonstrable shape and achieve results.
But it is equally possible to follow this link in another direction, taking real life as the point of departure in an investigation of how the ideas which express it and the forms of consciousness which reflect it emerge. The link, or rather the network of links between the two poles will prove to be complex. It must be unravelled, the thread must be carefully followed. In this way we can arrive at a criticism of life by ideas which in a sense extends and completes the first procedure.

where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind — and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
1960, Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

What then must we do? (1886)
Context: This new fraud is just like the old ones: its essence lies in substituting something external for the use of our own reason and conscience and that of our predecessors: in the Church teaching this external thing was revelation, in the scientific teaching it is observation. The trick played by this science is to destroy man's faith in reason and conscience by directing attention to the grossest deviations from the use of human reason and conscience, and having clothed the deception in a scientific theory, to assure them that by acquiring knowledge of external phenomena they will get to know indubitable facts which will reveal to them the law of man's life. And the mental demoralization consists in this, that coming to believe that things which should be decided by conscience and reason are decided by observation, these people lose their consciousness of good and evil and become incapable of understanding the expression and definitions of good and evil that have been formed by the whole preceding life of humanity. All this, in their jargon, is conditional and subjective. It must all be abandoned - they say - the truth cannot be understood by one's reason, for one may err, but there is another path which is infallible and almost mechanical: one must study facts. And facts must be studied on the basis of the scientists' science, that is, on the basis of two unfounded propositions: positivism and evolution which are put forward as indubitable truths. And the reigning science, with not less misleading solemnity than the Church, announces that the solution of all questions of life is only possible by the study of the facts of nature, and especially of organisms. A frivolous crowd of youths mastered by the novelty of this authority, which is as yet not merely not destroyed but not even touched by criticism, throws itself into the study of these facts of natural science as the sole path which, according to the assertions of the prevailing doctrine, can lead to the elucidation of the questions of life. But the further these disciples advance in this study the further and further are they removed not only from the possibility but even from the very thought of solving life's problems, and the more they become accustomed not so much to observe as to take on trust what they are told of the observations of others (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth state of matter,1 &c.), the more and more does the form hide the contents from them; the more and more do they lose consciousness of good and evil and capacity to understand the expressions and definitions of good and evil worked out by the whole preceding life of humanity; the more and more do they adopt the specialized scientific jargon of conventional expressions which have no general human significance; the farther and farther do they wander among the debris of quite unilluminated observations; the more and more do they lose capacity not only to think independently but even to under-stand another man's fresh human thought lying outside their Talmud; and, what is most important, they pass their best years in growing unaccustomed to life, that is, to labour, and grow accustomed to consider their condition justified, while they become physically good-for-nothing parasites. And just like the theologians and the Talmudists they completely castrate their brains and become eunuchs of thought. And just like them, to the degree to which they become stupefied, they acquire a self-confidence which deprives them for ever of the possibility of returning to a simple clear and human way of thinking.

Mussolini and Fascism (2003) by Patricia Knight, p. 46
Undated

Interviewed in the documentary series The Civil War, 1990
Context: Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

Guardian Dismé Latimer in Ch. 46 : nell latimer's journal<!-- , p. 498 -->
The Visitor (2002)
Context: To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn't that sound familiar?... They have consistently refused to have a god contest, and I fear they will have to encounter the godlet rather forcibly before they believe there is anything there at all.

The Age for Love
Context: The story he told me was "per sfogarsi," as Bayle loved to say; his idea was that I would not discover the real hero. I shall always believe that it was his own story under another name, and I love to believe it because it was so exactly his way of looking at things...

The Hundred Secret Senses (1995)
Context: My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
"Libby-ah," she'll say to me. "Guess who I see yesterday, you guess." And I don't have to guess that she's talking about someone dead.

"This Just In!" (30 January 2007)
Context: Don't you think that it's amazing that I'm singing into this silly camera with the desk lamp, and it's going through all these wires and everything else, and these computers, and you still feel what I'm feeling, and you still get what I'm trying to do? Yeah. I think its amazing. And I think it's so nice in a period when we're very isolated people, and kind of emotionless people, I think it's great that we can still touch one another and we can still feel what we're feeling, and we can still have fun, and we can be sad, and we can be happy, and to know that someone cares about you — because I really do. I really do.
And I can't believe that I have over 10,000 subscribers. What is wrong with you people?

A Conversation with Martin de Maat (1998)
Context: The base of the work is one of individuals believing in themselves, trusting themselves in the moment and being accepting of themselves and the people around them. In order to improvise in front of an audience, you have to be accepting, involved in the moment and courageous. Those issues, when transferred over to general communication, makes the communication richer and helps in all areas of life.

Playboy interview (1996)

"God Part II"
Lyrics, Rattle And Hum(1988)
Context: I don't believe the Devil, I don't believe his book, but the truth is not the same without the lies he made up.

"Answer #3" at his official website. http://www.chickcorea.com/from_chick.html
Context: I believe that any "awareness" of life is "spiritual" since awareness can only be a quality of the spirit not of the material world or of matter and machines. Only a spiritual being has awareness. But if you mean "spiritual" in the sense of a kind of "celebration of Life", then yes, I write music to celebrate life. I think most artists do, no matter how they themselves describe it. It's the joy of creating. It's a way of life.

IV, 3, 22.
Historiarum Alexandri Magni Macedonis Libri Qui Supersunt, Book IV

III Of the Ceremony of the Introit, "Creed of the Gnostic Catholic Church".
Liber XV : The Gnostic Mass (1913)
Context: I believe in the communion of Saints.
And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass.
And I confess one Baptism of Wisdom, whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation.
And I confess my life one, individual and eternal that was, and is, and is to come.

The Cultivation of Conspiracy (1998)
Context: The impending loss of spirit, of soul, of what I call atmosphere, could go unnoticed.
Only persons who face one another in trust can allow its emergence. The bouquet of friendship varies with each breath, but when it is there it needs no name. For a long time I believed that there was no one noun for it, and no verb for its creation. Each time I tried one, I was discouraged; all the synonyms for it were shanghaied by its synthetic counterfeits: mass-produced fashions and cleverly marketed moods, chic feelings, swank highs and trendy tastes. Starting in the seventies, group dynamics retreats and psychic training, all to generate "atmosphere," became major businesses. Discreet silence about the issue I am raising seemed preferable to creating a misunderstanding.
Then… I suddenly realized that there is indeed a very simple word that says what I cherished and tried to nourish, and that word is peace. Peace, however, not in any of the many ways its cognates are used all over the world, but peace in its post-classical, European meaning. Peace, in this sense, is the one strong word with which the atmosphere of friendship created among equals has been appropriately named. But to embrace this, one has to come to understand the origin of this peace in the conspirator, a curious ritual behavior almost forgotten today.

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)
Context: “If his master have given him a wife, and she hath borne him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself…The slave is allowed to have his liberty if he will give up his wife and children. He must remain in slavery for the sake of wife and child. This is another of the laws of the most merciful God. This God changes even love into a chain. Children are used by him as manacles and fetters, and wives become the keepers of prisons. Any man who believes that such hideous laws were made by an infinitely wise and benevolent God is, in my judgment, insane or totally depraved.

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)
Context: The right of no nation depends upon the date of its birth or the size of its power. As there can be no second class citizens before the law of America, so—we believe—there can be no second-class nations before the law of the world community.

The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2013
Context: (Speaking about the recent tsunami that struck the Philippines due to Typhoon Haiyan) Tell me about God... You don't have to become a disbeliever to remain a believer... But leave the disbelievers alone...

Excerpt from Clapper's memoir Facts And Fears, quoted in [In 'Facts And Fears,' Ex-Spy Boss Clapper Comes In From The Cold, Badly Chilled, https://www.npr.org/2018/05/22/613107871/in-facts-and-fears-ex-spy-boss-clapper-comes-in-from-the-cold-badly-chilled, 27 July 2018, National Public Radio, May 22, 2018]

Heretics and Heresies (1874)
Context: I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart. They have been true to their convictions, and, with a self-denial and fortitude excelled by none, have labored and suffered for the salvation of men. Imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, believing that by personal effort they could rescue at least a few souls from the infinite shadow of hell, they have cheerfully endured every hardship and scorned every danger. And yet, notwithstanding all this, they believed that honest error was a crime. They knew that the Bible so declared, and they believed that all unbelievers would be eternally lost. They believed that religion was of God, and all heresy of the devil. They killed heretics in defence of their own souls and the souls of their children. They killed them because, according to their idea, they were the enemies of God, and because the Bible teaches that the blood of the unbeliever is a most acceptable sacrifice to heaven.

"The Need for Ethical Culture" celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Ethical Culture Society, founded by Felix Adler (5 January 1951) (the full remarks can be found in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein and Carl Seelig http://books.google.com/books?id=UppFAAAAYAAJ)
1950s
Context: I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. … The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity.

Source: Liber Kaos (1992), p. 87
Context: The Conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Duty of Inquiry
Context: Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception which allows them not only to cast down, but also to degrade us. Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his beliefs with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.
It is not only the leader of men, statesmen, philosopher, or poet, that owes this bounden duty to mankind. Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit to her children beliefs which shall knit society together, or rend it in pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
It is true that this duty is a hard one, and the doubt which comes out of it is often a very bitter thing. It leaves us bare and powerless where we thought that we were safe and strong. To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances. We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, than when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn. And if we have supposed ourselves to know all about anything, and to be capable of doing what is fit in regard to it, we naturally do not like to find that we are really ignorant and powerless, that we have to begin again at the beginning, and try to learn what the thing is and how it is to be dealt with — if indeed anything can be learnt about it. It is the sense of power attached to a sense of knowledge that makes men desirous of believing, and afraid of doubting.

2000s, There Is No God (2005)

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 4
Context: The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Arthur's commentary
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: It is strange, when something rises before us as a possibility which we have hitherto believed to be very dreadful, we fancy it is a great crisis; that when we pass it we shall be different beings; some mighty change will have swept over our nature, and we shall lose entirely all our old selves, and become others. … Yet, when the thing, whether good or evil, is done, we find we were mistaken; we are seemingly much the same — neither much better nor worse; and then we cannot make it out; on either side there is a weakening of faith; we fancy we have been taken in; the mountain has heen in lahour, and we are perplexed to find the good less powerful than we expected, and the evil less evil.

Source: Life Itself : A Memoir (2011), Ch. 54 : How I Believe In God
Context: Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God disappeared. I kept this to myself. I never discussed it with my parents. My father in any event was a nonpracticing Lutheran, until a deathbed conversion that rather disappointed me. I’m sure he agreed to it for my mother’s sake. Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don’t. I avoid that because I don’t want to provide a category that people can apply to me. Those who say that “believer” and “atheist” are concrete categories do violence to the mystery we must be humble enough to confess. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word.

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)
Context: I'd like to clarify my comments about religious people being weak-minded. I didn't mean all religious people. I don't have any problem with the vast majority of religious folks. I count myself among them, more or less. But I believe because it makes sense to me, not because I think it can be proven. There are lots of people out there who think they know the truth about God and religion, but does anybody really know for sure? That's why the founding fathers built freedom of religious belief into the structure of this nation, so that everybody could make up their minds for themselves.
But I do have a problem with the people who think they have some right to try to impose their beliefs on others. I hate what the fundamentalist fanatics are doing to our country. It seems as though, if everybody doesn't accept their version of reality, that somehow invalidates it for them. Everybody must believe the same things they do. That's what I find weak and destructive.

As quoted in "My interview with R.A. Lafferty", by Tom Jackson, originally published in Lan's Lantern #39 (1991)
Context: I don't regard myself as a Surrealist in the sense of the "Surrealist Manifesto" published by Andre Breton in 1924. To me, that Manifesto is somewhat dated, being a recoil from World War I, and being too heavily Freudian. My own unconscious is more Jungian than Freudian. But if Breton hadn't staked claim to the name, I would probably call myself a Surrealist in the "Remembrance of Things Within" sense, but not in the "world of dream and fantasy joined to the everyday rational world, becoming 'an absolute reality, a surreality'." I suppose that I believe in another sort of a surreality or super-reality, but it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of myself and me. As often as not, it is the subconscious that supplies the rational element, and the exterior world that supplies the dream and fantasy feeling.

A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, First Part.
First Part of Narrative

Speech on Religious Intolerance as presented at the Pittsburgh Opera House (14 October 1879).
Context: They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)
Context: I believe the left is now in a fundamental fight about our future approach to international affairs: one where we decide whether to channel UK resources, diplomatic influence and military capability in defence of human rights and the protection of civilians; or one where we stand on the sidelines frozen by our recent failures. I believe it’s time for the left to revive its ethical foreign policy and in particular, rebuild the case for a progressive approach to humanitarian intervention.

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
Context: By looking back while prying, simultaneously, into the future, I will also be presenting to myself the most crucial turning points of my being and accomplishments. In this way I may succeed in setting into bold relief that which concerns the women's liberation struggle and, further, the social significance which it has. That I ought not to shape my life according to the given model, that I would have to grow beyond myself in order to be able to discern my life's true line of vision was an awareness that was mine already in my youngest years. At the same time I was also aware that in this way I could help my sisters to shape their lives, in accordance not with the given traditions but with their own free choice to the extent, of course, that social and economic circumstances permit. I always believed that the time inevitably must come when woman will be judged by the same moral standards applied to man. For it is not her specific virtue that gives her a place of honor in human society, but the worth of the useful mission accomplished by her, the worth of her personality as human being, as citizen, as thinker, as fighter. Subconsciously this motive was the leading force of my whole life and activity. To go my way, to work, to struggle, to create side by side with men, and to strive for the attainment of a universal human goal (for nearly thirty years, indeed, I have belonged to the Communists) but, at the same time, to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will and according to the given laws of my nature. It was this that conditioned my line of vision.

"Would you like to see a little of it?" said the Mock Turtle. (3 April 2010)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2010
Context: Could anything be more inimical to art than a fear of emotion, or a fear of "excessive" emotion, or a reluctance to express emotion around others? No, of course not. Art can even best the weights of utter fucking ignorance and totalitarian repression, but it cannot survive emotional constipation.
I want a T-shirt that says, "Art is Emo." We live in an age where people are more apt to believe a thing if they read it on a T-shirt.

I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994)
Context: If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don't believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?
I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.

University of Havana address (2005)
Context: All sense of dialectics is lost when someone believes that today’s economy is identical to the economy 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, or that it is identical to the one in Lenin’s day or to the time when Karl Marx lived. Revisionism is a thousand miles away from my mind and I truly revere Marx, Engels and Lenin.

A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, First Part.
First Part of Narrative

Book II, 1263b.15
Politics

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

Speech to the Conservative Party conference http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/oct/07/conservatives2002.conservatives1 (07 October 2002)
Context: How can students and parents plan for the future when they can't rely on the country's examination system to deliver fair results? We reject Labour's "government knows best" approach, but we certainly don't subscribe to a philosophy that lets people sink or swim. We believe that an active government should focus on doing what it can to help people get on with their lives. This is the true measure of a compassionate government.

Letter to Yale University (1899), quoted in Henry F. Pringle, William Howard Taft: The Life and Times, vol. 1, p. 45 (1939).

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 22. How I Then Tried to Diffuse the Theory of Three Dimensions by Other Means, and of the Result
Context: At times my spirit was too strong for me, and I gave vent to dangerous utterances. Already I was considered heterodox if not treasonable, and I was keenly alive to the danger of my position; nevertheless I could not at times refrain from bursting out into suspicious or half-seditious utterances, even among the highest Polygonal and Circular society. When, for example, the question arose about the treatment of those lunatics who said that they had received the power of seeing the insides of things, I would quote the saying of an ancient Circle, who declared that prophets and inspired people are always considered by the majority to be mad; and I could not help occasionally dropping such expressions as "the eye that discerns the interiors of things", and "the all-seeing land"; once or twice I even let fall the forbidden terms "the Third and Fourth Dimensions". At last, to complete a series of minor indiscretions, at a meeting of our Local Speculative Society held at the palace of the Prefect himself, — some extremely silly person having read an elaborate paper exhibiting the precise reasons why Providence has limited the number of Dimensions to Two, and why the attribute of omnividence is assigned to the Supreme alone — I so far forgot myself as to give an exact account of the whole of my voyage with the Sphere into Space, and to the Assembly Hall in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my return home, and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or vision. At first, indeed, I pretended that I was describing the imaginary experiences of a fictitious person; but my enthusiasm soon forced me to throw off all disguise, and finally, in a fervent peroration, I exhorted all my hearers to divest themselves of prejudice and to become believers in the Third Dimension.Need I say that I was at once arrested and taken before the Council?

That is the old Egyptian word for one of the several souls in their religion. Except for the Egyptians this will have no special connotation. And they can adapt to it.
Source: The Riverworld series, The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Ch. 20

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Context: America was the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance — that every man was potentially extraordinary — knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes.

As quoted in America: what my country means to me by 150 Americans from all walks of life http://books.google.com/?id=h4qpzo7yNxEC&pg=PA238&dq=tripoli+%22helen+thomas%22&q=tripoli%20%22helen%20thomas%22My (2002), Simon & Schuster, p. 238.

Letter to William Makepeace Thackeray (1831); quoted in The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyán (1947) by Alfred McKinley Terhune, p. 57.
Context: Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure.

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 38 : A Little Glass of Rum, pp.388-389
Context: Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation.

A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, First Part.
First Part of Narrative

1961, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress
Context: Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. […] Now it is time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise — time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure theft fulfillment. Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead-time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last. We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world, but as shown by feat of astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful. But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.

A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, First Part.
First Part of Narrative

Larry King Live interview (2010)
Context: That's the problem with the Drudge-Rush-Fox axis-of-evil news bubble. Nothing gets into these people's heads. They only listen to what they want to hear. They listen to what confirms what they believe. And what they believe is what they got from these people to begin with.
You know, when Glenn Beck had his big rally on the mall, he said something like — he at one point said, "Today, I was holding George Washington's inaugural in my hand." No — you can't do that — it's in Plexiglas. You can't — it's 200 years old. You can't give that to people to pass around and smudge up with their grimy fingers. But it didn't matter, because it never matters to these people because nothing they say is ever fact-checked. The governor of Arizona talks about how illegals — you saw this on the news — were beheading people in Arizona. When the press asked her about it, because it was patently untrue, she just ran away. Sarah Palin never talks to the press because they might ask her a question that she doesn't have a pat answer for. They know they don't have to deal with reality, because they don't have to go to what used to be the mainstream press.

"Fear and Loathing in Elko" Rolling Stone (23 January 1992)
1990s
Context: It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to still believe in Santa Claus — but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year... Some people can accept this, and some can't. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season.

Presidency (1977–1981), The Crisis of Confidence (1979)
Context: I know, of course, being President, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That's why I've worked hard to put my campaign promises into law — and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.
It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

A Doll's House (1879)
Context: Helmer: First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.
Nora: That I don't believe any more. I believe that first and foremost I am an individual, just as you are.

State of Fear (2004)
Context: I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely emerges in another form. Even if you don't believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Radio address "Our American Culture" broadcast during an intermission of the Metropolitan Opera. (1 March 1941)
Context: Once a man has tasted freedom he will never be content to be a slave. That is why I believe that this frightfulness we see everywhere today is only temporary. Tomorrow will be better for as long as America keeps alive the ideals of freedom and a better life. All men will want to be free and share our way of life. There must be so much that I should have said, but haven't. What I will say now is just what most of us are probably thinking every day. I thank God and America for the right to live and raise my family under the flag of tolerance, democracy and freedom.

Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)
Context: I never dwell on past mistakes… There is too much to plan for the future to waste time complaining.  Elsie Mendl was a great friend of mine for many, many years. And I remember the creed by which she lived: Never complain, never explain. Just think of the people you know who are always explaining their mistakes. It merely rubs the whole thing in. You’re reminded again of the mistake. And no one believes the explanation anyway.

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
Context: If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it — as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

Book II, lines 1026–1029 (tr. Stallings)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

This I Believe (1952)
Context: I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones.

Speech to Young Conservative Conference (12 February 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105252
First term as Prime Minister
Context: Peace is not bought cheaply. It cannot be won without cost. The cost of Britain's defence is the price we pay to prevent war. The money for our armed services is truly our “peace tax”. What a cruel irony it is that the word “peace” has been hijacked by those who seek one-sided disarmament. It's ironic because if only one side disarms, the other is far more tempted to aggression. Unilateralism makes war more likely. We who believe in strong defence are the true peace party.

1961, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress
Context: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations — explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon — if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

Nicodemus The Poet, The Youngest Of The Elders In The Sanhedrim: On Fools And Jugglers
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: Am I less man because I believe in a greater man?
The barriers of flesh and bone fell down when the Poet of Galilee spoke to me; and I was held by a spirit, and was lifted to the heights, and in midair my wings gathered the song of passion.
And when I dismounted from the wind and in the Sanhedrim my pinions were shorn, even then my ribs, my featherless wings, kept and guarded the song. And all the poverties of the lowlands cannot rob me of my treasure.
I have said enough. Let the deaf bury the humming of life in their dead ears. I am content with the sound of His lyre, which He held and struck while the hands of His body were nailed and bleeding.

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in (August 25, 2016)
Context: For all Americans. Because I believe we are stronger together. It’s a vision for the future rooted in our values and reflected in a rising generation of young people who are the most open, diverse, and connected we’ve ever seen.... Let’s keep moving forward together. Let’s stand up against prejudice and paranoia. Let’s prove once again, that America is great because is America is good.

As quoted in The Martians of Science : Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (2006) by István Hargittai, p. 251
Context: I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994)
Context: If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don't believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?
I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.

Context: I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral, and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe that the armed forces are well served by saying through our policies that it's okay to be immoral in any way, not just with regards to homosexual acts.

As quoted in "A conversation with Garth Nix" by Claire E. White at Writers Write (July-August 2000) http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jul00/nix.htm
Context: I don't believe authors need to keep any specific values or ideas in mind while they are writing for children, but I do think authors need to be aware of their audience, and of the effect their work may have. So if they want to address particularly sensitive topics or taboos, they have to do so consciously and carefully. This is very different to toeing a particular moral line or leaving things out.
Certainly I don't think good always has to triumph over evil; it depends on the story and the aims of the book. For example, I could envisage telling a story where the inaction of people leads to the triumph of evil. But I would include the hope that this would lead to the people involved doing better next time. Is that story then really about the triumph of evil, or is it about the awakening of opposition to evil?

"God Part II"
Lyrics, Rattle And Hum(1988)
Context: I don't believe in rape. But everytime She passes by, wild thoughts escape

The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959)
Context: In ancient classical literature the rainbow sometimes was deified as Iris; at other times it was regarded merely as the route traversed by the messenger of Hera. The conception of the rainbow as a pathway or bridge has been widespread. For some it has been the best of all bridges, built out of three colors; for others the phrase "building on the rainbow" has meant a bootless enterprise. North American Indians were among those who thought of the rainbow as the Pathway of Souls, an interpretation found in many other places. Among the Japanese the rainbow is identified as the "Floating Bridge of Heaven"; and Hawaiian and Polynesian myths allude to the bow as the path to the upper world. In the Austrian Alps the souls of the righteous are said to ascend the bow to heaven; and in New Zealand the dead chieftains are believed to pass along it to reach their new home. In parts of France the rainbow is called the pont du St. Esprit, and in many places it is the bridge of St. Bernard or of St. Martin or of St. Peter. Basque pilgrims knew it as the 'puente de Roma'. Sometimes it is called instead the Croy de St. Denis (or of St. Leonard or of St. Bernard or of St. Martin). In Italy the name arcu de Santa Marina is relatively familiar. Associations of the rainbow and the milky way are frequent. The Arabic name for the milky way is equivalent to Gate of Heaven, and in Russia the analogous role was played by the rainbow. Elsewhere also the bow has been called the Gate of Paradise; and by some the rainbow has been thought to be a ray of light which falls on the earth when Peter opens the heavenly gate. In parts of France the rainbow is known as the porte de St. Jacques, while the milky way is called chemin de St. Jacques. In Swabia and Bavaria saints pass by the rainbow from heaven to earth; while in Polynesia this is the route of the gods themselves.
In Eddic literature the bow served as a link between the gods and man — the Bifrost bridge, guarded by Heimdel, over which the gods passed daily. At the time of the Gotterdamerung the sons of Muspell will cross the bridge and then demolish it. Sometimes also in the Eddas the rainbow is interpreted as a necklace worn by Freyja, the "necklace of the Brisings," alluded to in Beowulf; again it is the bow of Thor from which he shoots arrows at evil spirits. Among the Finns it has been an arc which hurls arrows of fire, in Mozambique it is the arm of a conquering god. In the Japanese Ko-Ji-Ki (or Records of Ancient Matters), compiled presumably in 712, the creation of the island of Onogoro is related to the rainbow. Deities, standing upon the "floating bridge of heaven," thrust down a jeweled spear into the brine and stirred with it. When the spear was withdrawn, the brine that dripped down from the end was piled up in the form of the island. In myth and legend the rainbow has been regarded variously as a harbinger of misfortune and as a sign of good luck. Some have held it to be a bad sign if the feet of the bow rest on water, whereas a rainbow arching from dry land to dry land is a good augury. Dreambooks held that when one dreams of seeing a rainbow, he will give or receive a gift according as the bow is seen in the west or the east. The Crown-prince Frederick August took it as a good omen when, upon his receiving the kingdom form Napoleon in 1806, a rainbow appeared; but others interpreted it as boding ill, a view confirmed by the war and destruction of Saxony which ensued. By many, a rainbow appearing at the birth of a child is taken to be a favorable sign; but in Slavonic accounts a glance from the fay who sits at the foot of the rainbow, combing herself, brings death.

p. 27

Preface (18 July 1819), p. 4
The Bank of Faith and Works United (1819)
Context: As I am not a member of any community, no society can answer for my irregular conduct; neither do I wish to apologize to the world for my procedure; as I believe the Lord is my Shepherd, and Bishop of my soul.
Duty to my Maker, excites me to faithfulness, knowing that life is the time to work for God; that I may be counted worthy to reign with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in "the city of the Living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem."

Letter to a Quaker (1798)
Context: As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life, and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived — a Defensive war I think a righteous war to Defend my life &amp; property &amp; that of my family, in my own opinion, is right &amp; justifiable in the sight of God.
An offensive war, I believe to be wrong and would therefore have nothing to do with it, having no right to meddle with another man's property, his ox or his ass, his man servant or his maid servant or anything that is his. Neither does he have a right to meddle with anything that is mine, if he does I have a right to defend it by force.

Scaffold speech (1683)
Context: I am persuaded to believe that God had left nations to the liberty of setting up such governments as best pleased themselves, and that magistrates were set up for the good of nations, not nations for the honor and glory of magistrates. That the right and power of magistrates in every country was that which the laws of that country made it to be. That these laws are to be observed and the oaths taken by rulers to be kept. And that having the force of contracts between magistrates and people, they cannot be violated without danger of dissolving the whole fabric.

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)
Context: As a result of what he did not teach in connection with what he did teach, his followers saw no harm in slavery, no harm in polygamy. They belittled this world and exaggerated the importance of the next. They consoled the slave by telling him that in a little while he would exchange his chains for wings. They comforted the captive by saying that in a few days he would leave his dungeon for the bowers of Paradise. His followers believed that he had said that “Whosoever believeth not shall be damned.” This passage was the cross upon which intellectual liberty was crucified. If Christ had given us the laws of health; if he had told us how to cure disease by natural means; if he had set the captive free; if he had crowned the people with their rightful power; if he had placed the home above the church; if he had broken all the mental chains; if he had flooded all the caves and dens of fear with light, and filled the future with a common joy, he would in truth have been the Savior of this world.

Mind and Matter (1958)
Context: To my view the ‘statistical theory of time’ has an even stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the undirectional flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory constructs it from the order of events. This means a liberation from the tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it. But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So with all due acknowledgement to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.

2000s, 2002, Compassionate Conservatism (April 2002)

31 August 1869
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: My mind has been a tumult of opposing systems, — Stoicism, Quietism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a temptation, why return to it, after having judged and conquered it?
Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. The individual is an eternal dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never leaves me, even in my moments of religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Mala; and I look at her, as it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child hidden — a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idyls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer.