Susan Jacoby Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Whether you are religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer no more.

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

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

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

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.

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

The Roman Empire was fairly tolerant of religious choice as long as you made a point not of thumbing your nose in public at the Roman gods.

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

I'd be the last person in the world to deny that there are many people for whom faith is - can be a great sustaining force.

Once the Roman Catholic Church in the West became the church most closely connected with the state, the Roman Catholic Church did not recognize the validity of any religion other than its own.

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.

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

I think people who love each other and live together and have children together need to agree on the things that are most important in life.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

hope is not a plan of action.