Famous Quotes & Sayings

Susan Jacoby Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 52 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Susan Jacoby.

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Famous Quotes By Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 856366

Atheism is not a religion. One of the things, in fact, that atheism lacks are the kinds of rituals that religion does provide and I would be the first to say that. — Susan Jacoby

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I have received many touching letters and emails from people who live in the most religious parts of the country, in places like rural Texas, saying it is so good to see someone be able to say I am an atheist without shame. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1899505

At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1498410

Ingersoll was introduced as one of the main speakers by Frederick Douglass and proceeded, unlike most leaders of his party, to eviscerate the court's logic. "This decision takes from seven millions of people the shield of the Constitution," he said. "It leaves the best of the colored race at the mercy of the meanest of the white. It feeds fat the ancient grudge that vicious ignorance bears toward race and color. It will be approved and quoted by hundreds of thousands of unjust men. The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court. The men who, by mob violence, prevent the negro from depositing his ballot - those who with gun and revolver drive him from the polls, and those who insult with vile and vulgar words the inoffensive colored girl, will welcome this decision with hyena joy. The basest will rejoice - the noblest will mourn. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1456946

A person can be religious and still respect secular values and not talk about Jesus all the time as though every American believed in Jesus. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1338448

I completely can't understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it's right. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 190374

The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1800373

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1978290

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 255601

It's something fundamental to me, human rights that people are equal under law simply because they are human beings. And I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed, for instance, as Orthodox Jews do, that women are unclean during their menstrual periods. — Susan Jacoby

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Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 422563

I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1718444

I still do find the prayers of the Kaddish quite moving, and I just substitute in my mind nature, although that's what the founders did in a lot of their documents, too. They substituted nature or providence for God. I think that's what I do in my head with Jewish God. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 2264709

It is hard to think of conversion as a blinding light on the road to Damascus, or as a highly spiritual or intellectual process, when the light comes from a flickering television; the voice of the deity is Bishop Sheen and you have drilled your father on his catechism answers ... I was troubled at a young age by the idea that pouring water over someone's head could change both his relationship to God ... — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 941191

I no more believe in the God of the Jews than I believe in any God. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 805104

God Bless America started to become an almost ritualistic incantation at the end of political speeches really with Ronald Reagan. It appears occasionally before, but it was not that common. And of course since it was a song that wasn't written by Irving Berlin until the 20th century (laughter), none of the 19th century presidents said God Bless America at the end of speeches, either. I think that the symbolism which suggests that everybody is religious and that even presidents who believe in church and state feel obliged to do this ... — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1132738

I don't ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can't imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1532607

Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 983460

I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 693784

I'm not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it's not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1212287

Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1586110

I believe that whether one believes in God or not is - it's very central to who I am. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 106134

If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1616954

I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 368213

Printed works do not take up mental space simply by virtue of being there; attention must be paid or their content, whether simple or complex, can never be truly assimilated. The willed attention demanded by print is the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by infotainment media, whether one is talking about the tunes on an iPod, a picture flashing briefly on a home page, a text message, a video game, or the latest offering of "reality" TV. That all of these sources of information and entertainment are capable of simultaneously engendering distraction and absorption accounts for much of their snakelike charm. — Susan Jacoby

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Hope is not a plan of action. — Susan Jacoby

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I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn't be able to vote and are inferior to whites. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 335519

My atheism doesn't define my day-to-day life at all. But I realize - and maybe it is because, unlike people who sort of stay comfortably in a religion, I had to do a lot of thinking and reading before I realized that I was an atheist. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1924240

Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who ... even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot. — Susan Jacoby

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One of the interesting things is is that Judaism was very attractive to the Roman aristocracy. — Susan Jacoby

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I have always regarded the development of the individual as the only legitimate goal of education. — Susan Jacoby

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Religious education is only valuable intellectually, if the child is educated in a religion versus [just] about a religion. I don't believe you can have both. — Susan Jacoby

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It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject. — Susan Jacoby

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If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 193423

The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization — Susan Jacoby

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I don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God. — Susan Jacoby

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The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence. — Susan Jacoby

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One of the reasons there are largely Catholic and largely Protestant regions of Germany today is that people did sort themselves out geographically. — Susan Jacoby

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The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization. — Susan Jacoby

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One of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1487633

High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1484785

People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1484464

I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 591068

For one thing, the Catholic Church in particular has this one thing - confession - in which you could go, confess to a priest and obtain absolution of your sins. And there was a routine and a ritual and I think - I think that it did help. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 645032

That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1203453

I wanted to know how much of conversion was forced - that is, forced in the sense that the Inquisition forced people to choose - forced Jews, let's say, and Muslims to choose conversion to Christianity or death. I wanted to see how much of conversion historically was forced in that way and how much of it was really a kind of persuasion. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1157146

If you chose a particular religion, you were siding with the government religion of whatever region you were in. That's never been true in America, but also, the United States also has so many more immigrant groups which also tends to imply more religious diversity right away. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 1046436

Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way. — Susan Jacoby

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This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 964185

More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 911515

I don't deny that religion is very healthful to a lot of people. And as long as they don't try to convert me, I have, you know, nothing - and to interfere with the rights of people to believe other religions or to not believe in any religion at all - as long as they mind their own religion - perfectly all right with me. — Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby Quotes 888580

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth. — Susan Jacoby