Accept As Valid Quotes & Sayings

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text. Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just conjured three different visions of damnation. Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth. Is it such a stretch, then, to make moral choices about food based on the global consequences of its production and transport? — Barbara Kingsolver

I believe music is the language of youth, and the more you can accept as being valid, the younger your attitude gets. — Robert McCammon

It is the right of art to consider an impression valid simply as an impression and to accept it as something entire and complete without critical scrutiny. Art is, as Schopenhauer puts it, "everywhere at its goal." But for life, and hence surely also for religion, there is a danger, the romantic danger, in making the impression of an experience all-important. For then the sense for the content and commandment of life must all too soon evaporate together with any sense for reality with its definite tasks; and the place of all aspiration and expectation will be taken over by the sole dominion of the mood of faith which simply feels itself, and then finds it easy to deem itself, complete. This is faith for faith's sake. — Leo Baeck

The brain is an organ that builds models and makes creative predictions, but its models and predictions can as easily be specious as valid. Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones. Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy. — Jeff Hawkins

We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books- theoretically at least. — Mark Twain

Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a second language, not their mother tongue. How many people would accept to be tested for their IQ level not in their primary language? — T.K. Naliaka

So long as you believe yourself to be 'only human' you have accepted life in a prison cell whose door remains locked only by your own mind.
By saying, 'well, I'm only human', you have blindly submitted to all the limitations, fears, pettiness, greed and hatreds which make the common person weak and fragile.
Most never become aware that another way is possible.
You are human, but much more, too.
The much-moreness is the vast, brilliant freedom and power which has confined itself in your humanity.
If you are willing (and not everyone is, which is also a perfectly valid choice), you can begin to explore your native powers and experience freedom within limitation. When you do this, you live fully while you are here and you are no longer afraid to die.
When you are not afraid of death but seek to live in a state of always-discovering, this is when life is transformed and you accept your birthright to choose and create in extraordinary fashion. — Jacob Nordby

It's vital that the monarchy keeps in touch with the people. It's what I try and do. — Princess Diana

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect. — Abbas Kiarostami

Projecting our needs onto somebody else's disagreement is very manipulative and makes it impossible for the parties involved to come to an understanding of what they want and need for themselves. It may also lead us to draw false equivalences between people's behavior, where we just assume that both sides have equal truth because we are unwilling to accept that there might be very valid grievances at play, and that the people involved might never agree to a solution. What we should be saying instead is, "What do you really want here? Do you want to work this out, or do you want to go your separate ways? — Ethan Nichtern

If any one asks: 'Why should I accept the results of valid arguments based on true premisses?' we can only answer by appealing to our principle. In fact, the truth of the principle is impossible to doubt, and its obviousness is so great that at first sight it seems almost trivial. Such principles, however, are not trivial to the philosopher, for they show that we may have indubitable knowledge which is in no way derived from objects of sense. The — Bertrand Russell

It is necessary to stay on the march, to be on the journey, to work for peace wherever we are at all times, because the liberty we cherish, which we would share with the world, demands eternal vigilance. — Ossie Davis

I see the Christian world like this: we've inherited a divided map of the truth, and each of us has a piece. Our traditions teach us that no one else has a valid map and that our own church's piece shows us all the terrain and roads that exist. In fact, there is much more terrain, more roads, and more truth for us to see if we can accept and read one another's maps, fitting them together to give us a clearer picture of the larger Christian tradition. — Michael Spencer

If you can't see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture? — Anne Fadiman

The Bible teaches that there is a holy God whose law constitutes a transcendent, universally valid standard of right and wrong. Our choice has no effect at all on this standard; our choice simply determines whether we accept it, or reject it and suffer the consequences. — Charles W. Colson

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all. — Douglas Adams

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits. — Dan Barker

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why. — Diane Wakoski

The willingness to accept an idea as valid or as truth because it has been accepted as such for so long or because it has been heard so often is an example of a belief acquired through tradition. — Annabel Ness Evans

In any event, it has never been true that we ignore mainstream science; and anyone who reads AEI publications closely can see that we are not 'skeptics' about warming. It is possible to accept the general consensus about the existence of global warming while having valid questions about the extent of warming, the consequences of warming, and the appropriate responses. — Steven F. Hayward

Everyone who loves pro basketball assumes it's a little fixed. We all think the annual draft lottery is probably rigged, we all accept that the league aggressively wants big market teams to advance deep into the playoffs, and we all concede that certain marquee players are going to get preferential treatment for no valid reason. The outcomes of games aren't predeteremined or scripted but there are definitely dark forces who play with our reality. There are faceless puppet masters who pull strings and manipulate the purity of justice. It's not necessarily a full-on conspiracy, but it's certainly not fair. And that's why the NBA remains the only game that matters: Pro basketball is exactly like life. — Chuck Klosterman

About the only valid definition (of science fiction) that I'm willing to accept is this: all of modern, mainstream, and realistic fiction is simply a branch, a category, or a subset of science fiction. — Mike Resnick

To acknowledge, to accept, and to forgive one's parents - both what they gave and what they did not give, both one's dependence upon them and one's independence of them - is the ultimate hallmark of maturity: a perception as valid for institutions as for individuals. — Ernest Kurtz