Top 100 Jonathan Sacks Quotes
#1. Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.
Jonathan Sacks
#2. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#3. God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.
Jonathan Sacks
#4. Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share.
Jonathan Sacks
#5. Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.
Jonathan Sacks
#6. In our interconnected world, we must learn to feel enlarged, not threatened, by difference - that is what I have argued.
Jonathan Sacks
#7. A survey carried out across the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity.
Jonathan Sacks
#8. Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organizations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighborhood and civic groups and professional associations.
Jonathan Sacks
#9. What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Sacks
#10. When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.
Jonathan Sacks
#11. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.
Jonathan Sacks
#12. The emphasis has been on rights, not responsibilities. When it comes to piecing together the fragments of broken lives, we have tended to place the entire burden on the state and its agencies.
Jonathan Sacks
#13. The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.
Jonathan Sacks
#14. Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.
Jonathan Sacks
#16. Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state.
Jonathan Sacks
#17. Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.
Jonathan Sacks
#18. We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast.
Jonathan Sacks
#19. No great achiever - even those who made it seem easy - ever succeeded without hard work.
Jonathan Sacks
#20. Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the sick and elderly, or even protection against violence and abuse.
Jonathan Sacks
#21. Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.
Jonathan Sacks
#22. Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.
Jonathan Sacks
#23. We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.
Jonathan Sacks
#24. Katharine Hepburn said it best. 'Nature', she says majestically to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, 'is what we are put in this world to rise above.' The
Jonathan Sacks
#25. Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom.
Jonathan Sacks
#26. If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion.
Jonathan Sacks
#27. As Shakespeare said, 'The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.'4
Jonathan Sacks
#28. If we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. To put it more precisely, we need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.
Jonathan Sacks
#29. A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.
Jonathan Sacks
#31. Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
Jonathan Sacks
#32. The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.
Jonathan Sacks
#33. Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.
Jonathan Sacks
#34. In her religious role, the Queen is head of the Church of England, but in her civic role she cares for all her subjects, and no one is better at making everyone she meets feel valued.
Jonathan Sacks
#35. Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.
Jonathan Sacks
#36. The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.
Jonathan Sacks
#37. Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.
Jonathan Sacks
#38. The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals to anyone familiar with the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, created specifically because of the danger of people being trapped by debt.
Jonathan Sacks
#40. In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel ...
Jonathan Sacks
#41. Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say.
Jonathan Sacks
#42. Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.
Jonathan Sacks
#43. The wisest rule in investment is: when others are selling, buy. When others are buying, sell. Usually, of course, we do the opposite. When everyone else is buying, we assume they know something we don't, so we buy. Then people start selling, panic sets in, and we sell too.
Jonathan Sacks
#44. Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.
Jonathan Sacks
#45. We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue.
Jonathan Sacks
#46. Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects.
Jonathan Sacks
#47. The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.
Jonathan Sacks
#48. ISIS is a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity. In the current political climate, when hate crimes are rising and political rhetoric is increasingly divisive, this is all the more shocking.
Jonathan Sacks
#49. As the political leaders of Europe meet to save the euro and European Union, so should religious leaders.
Jonathan Sacks
#50. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.
Jonathan Sacks
#51. Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good ... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
Jonathan Sacks
#52. Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.
Jonathan Sacks
#53. We have lots of heroes today - sportsmen, supermodels, media personalities. They come, they have their 15 minutes of fame, and they go. But the influence of good teachers stays with us. They are the people who really shape our lives.
Jonathan Sacks
#54. God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.
Jonathan Sacks
#55. Follow your passion. Nothing - not wealth, success, accolades or fame - is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don't enjoy.
Jonathan Sacks
#56. We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible's single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.
Jonathan Sacks
#57. Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.
Jonathan Sacks
#58. Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin
Jonathan Sacks
#59. Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.
Jonathan Sacks
#60. Close to a billion people - one-eighth of the world's population - still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.
Jonathan Sacks
#61. What I find fascinating about Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights we celebrate at this time of the year, is the way its story was transformed by time.
Jonathan Sacks
#62. We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.
Jonathan Sacks
#63. True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.
Jonathan Sacks
#64. Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.
Jonathan Sacks
#65. A perfect storm is in the making: financial uncertainty, economic downturn, government cuts, rising unemployment and a future that looks less clear the more we try to fathom it.
Jonathan Sacks
#66. The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.
Jonathan Sacks
#67. Jews have deep respect for the Queen and the royal family. We say a prayer for them every Sabbath in synagogue. We recite a special blessing on seeing the Queen.
Jonathan Sacks
#68. For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross. Once
Jonathan Sacks
#69. the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry.
Jonathan Sacks
#70. The market economy is deeply congruent with the values set out in the Hebrew Bible. Material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task. Work is a noble calling.
Jonathan Sacks
#71. The twenty-first century is, and will remain, the Age of Insecurity.
Jonathan Sacks
#72. I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.
Jonathan Sacks
#73. Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.
Jonathan Sacks
#74. Yahoo has gone too far in wrongfully accusing us of a conspiracy that doesn't exist. If they are having problems retaining engineers, they should be looking at the internal sources of employee dissatisfaction rather than trying to cover that up with this legal action.
Jonathan Sacks
#75. The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.
Jonathan Sacks
#76. While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.
Jonathan Sacks
#77. I think our people in Britain have a normative expectation of ethical conduct.
Jonathan Sacks
#78. Einstein said it most famously: 'Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.'1
Jonathan Sacks
#79. The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.
Jonathan Sacks
#80. That this occurred at the launch of the report into the Labour Party's recent troubles with antisemitism shows how deep the sickness is in parts of left of British politics today.
Jonathan Sacks
#81. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.
Jonathan Sacks
#82. The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation.
Jonathan Sacks
#83. Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
Jonathan Sacks
#84. Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Jonathan Sacks
#85. When we love and make loving commitments, we create families and communities within which people can grow and take risks, knowing that hands will be there to catch them should they fall.
Jonathan Sacks
#86. our views of the natural are shaped by our ideas of the supernatural.
Jonathan Sacks
#87. After the destructionofthe Second Temple Jewslived by an ancient and fundamental insight, that God does not live in buildings but in the human heart.
Jonathan Sacks
#88. The universe is more than mere matter in motion. It and we were brought into being by a Creator who seeks our good.
Jonathan Sacks
#89. If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.
Jonathan Sacks
#90. If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.
Jonathan Sacks
#91. It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.
Jonathan Sacks
#92. I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.
Jonathan Sacks
#93. Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
Jonathan Sacks
#94. Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.
Jonathan Sacks
#95. We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.
Jonathan Sacks
#96. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jonathan Sacks
#97. Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Jonathan Sacks
#98. To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.
Jonathan Sacks
#99. Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds.
Jonathan Sacks
#100. Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives.
Jonathan Sacks
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