Robert Neelly Bellah Quotes

#1. That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#2. We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning ...

Robert Neelly Bellah

#3. We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#4. The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#5. The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#6. Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#7. The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#8. While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#9. However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#10. Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#11. For limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#12. We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#13. It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.

Robert Neelly Bellah

#14. The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we're politically correct on everything, but it's still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong.

Robert Neelly Bellah