Top 43 Kaminer Quotes
#1. It's funny, I see Wendy Kaminer herself as a kind of guru - a guru of the fashionably cynical set. Yet she uses the term "guru" to minimize my career, to marginalize my thoughts and to trivialize my work, as well as those of others.
Marianne Williamson
#2. I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.
Wendy Kaminer
#3. Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.
Wendy Kaminer
#4. I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.
Wendy Kaminer
#5. For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.
Wendy Kaminer
#6. Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
Wendy Kaminer
#7. What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression ...
Wendy Kaminer
#9. There are only two states of being in the world of codependency - recovery and denial.
Wendy Kaminer
#10. Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.
Wendy Kaminer
#11. When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.
Wendy Kaminer
#12. As you begin your tour of the United States, you may as well know that one American national trait which irritates many Americans and must be convenient for our critics is that we relentlessly advertise our imperfections.
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
#13. Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice - a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.
Wendy Kaminer
#14. The phenomenal success of the recovery movement reflects two simple truths that emerge in adolescence: all people love to talk about themselves, and most people are mad at their parents. You don't have to be in denial to doubt that truths like these will set us free.
Wendy Kaminer
#16. I don't want posterity, I don't want anybody to remember me in any way. I don't care about that because I'll be dead. I think the spirit will move to some other state.
Isabel Allende
#17. If all issues are personalized, we lose our capacity to entertain ideas, to generalize from our own or someone else's experiences, to think abstractly. We substitute sentimentality for thought.
Wendy Kaminer
#18. Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack (on the World Trade Center and Pentagon), we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.
Wendy Kaminer
#19. The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate.
Wendy Kaminer
#20. The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.
Wendy Kaminer
#21. In the final analysis, it is your decision to make, but it doesn't move as fast as I'd like it to move.
Alphonso Jackson
#22. Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.
Wendy Kaminer
#23. We don't cut off the hands of thieves or castrate rapists. Why must we murder murderers?
Wendy Kaminer
#24. In this climate - with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace - making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall.
Wendy Kaminer
#25. His love roared louder than her demons.
Anonymous
#27. Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
Wendy Kaminer
#28. Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles ... take a hard line on intellectualism ... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened.
Wendy Kaminer
#30. Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best - monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.
Wendy Kaminer
#31. Always seek to excel yourself. Put yourself in competition with yourself each day. Each morning look back upon your work of yesterday and then try to beat it
Charles Sheldon
#32. In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.
Wendy Kaminer
#33. Next to her, I felt like Carrot Top in drag.
Cat re: Annette
Jeaniene Frost
#34. It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.
Wendy Kaminer
#35. As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
Wendy Kaminer
#36. The bureaucratic culture that we [Afghanistan] have inherited is an obstacle. Hierarchies may be extremely efficient for dealing with certain events, but they are not quick in responding to global, flexible networks.
Ashraf Ghani
#37. Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.
Wendy Kaminer
#38. The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination with near-death experiences and the growing belief by Americans
34 percent of them
in reincarnation are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason.
Wendy Kaminer
#39. If you rescue me from my pipe dreams, I'll stop smoking fantasies.
Munia Khan
#40. Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.
Charles Churchill
#41. Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.
Wendy Kaminer
#42. When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.
Will Rogers
#43. I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.
Eileen Myles
