Quotes About Convictions

#1. There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything.

Simon Blackburn

#2. Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

William Carlos Williams

#3. The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos

Stephen Jay Gould

#4. For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

Terry Eagleton

#5. We've all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor.

Bryan Stevenson

#6. Conviction, far from being based upon reason, is the enemy of reason; because rationality does not change, while convictions do, all the time.

Idries Shah

#7. Pain and disease awaken us to convictions which are necessary to our moral condition.

Samuel Johnson

#8. The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions.

Walter Benjamin

#9. Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

Chris Cleave

#10. It's easier to be hedonistic and just chase after whatever appeals to your senses. That's the life of an animal, you just do. It's more difficult to stand by your convictions and have people berate you on both sides and feel like there's no home for you.

LeCrae

#11. Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the "legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago." There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#12. I've been around in public life for a long time. I think people know what I stand for. They know that I have strong convictions, committed principles and I'm prepared to stand up for them.

Malcolm Turnbull

#13. There aren't many honest men or women in Washington anymore. Politicians get where they are by the sheer force of their egos, not their convictions. And you know what? It's our fault as voters. We don't demand better candidates, so we end up getting what we deserve - on both sides of the aisle.

Brad Thor

#14. One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.

Mahatma Gandhi

#15. Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

Khaled Hosseini

#16. How can we help students to understand that the tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined and convictions undeclared and service unfulfilled?

Vachel Lindsay

#17. Convictions do not imply reasons.

Margaret Deland

#18. My problem is I'm a man of no convictions - at least, I think I am.

Christopher Hampton

#19. I am ready to defend my convictions even unto death. I have followed the Sacred Scriptures and the holy doctors.

John Wycliffe

#20. It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.

John Ciardi

#21. Kiefer Sutherland has agreed to serve 48 days in jail for his DUI convictions. That's 245 months in Jack Bauer years.

Chelsea Handler

#22. Out of fear, out of the desire for approval, out of misguided notions of duty, people surrender themselves
their convictions and their aspirations
every day. There is nothing noble about it. It takes far more courage to fight for your values than to relinquish them.

Nathaniel Branden

#23. If you're afraid to defend your convictions because you might get your ass kicked for it, you're not really fit to advocate for them.

James Carlos Blake

#24. My parents were always clear with my brothers and I when we were growing up that you have to have the courage of your convictions and that when you commit to something you must fully commit,

David Pocock

#25. The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

Nancy Pearcey

#26. [Ronald] Reagan seems to be a man of some basic convictions and on the other hand willing to let others do the ground homework, the detailed work.

Helmut Schmidt

#27. This idea, as you know, that I have firm convictions that the idea of issues being a big deal where our mutual friend went back and he felt so strongly that the determining factor in electoral success should be a proven character.

James Stockdale

#28. Sometimes we make our alliances not by the shape and color of our flesh but by the convictions of our heart.

Neal Shusterman

#29. It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#30. History has repeatedly been changed by people who had the desire and the ability to transfer their convictions and emotions to their listeners.

Dale Carnegie

#31. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

Barton Swaim

#32. There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.

Susan Cain

#33. If this war has taught us anything, it is that convictions of righteous certitude can be soul-corrupting illusions that offer mo dispensation from hell.

C.S. Harris

#34. Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Bertrand Russell

#35. Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone's lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don't have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.

Rick Warren

#36. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.

Malcolm X

#37. Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time.

Bill Gates

#38. I have always defended my convictions and what I believed to be the truth.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

#39. that every man must have a code, an ethos, a set of convictions that dictate his purpose and behavior in life. This code "forms the box" in which he lives and moves and makes decisions.

Daniel A. Biddle

#40. We Masons are among the fortunate ones who are taught to meet together with others opposing convictions or competitive ideas and yet respect each other as Brothers.

Albert Pike

#41. My parents' convictions, when it came to discipline, were not very strong. For my bar mitzvah, I gave out a mix tape of '90s grunge - if you got it now, you would think it was the 'Singles' soundtrack.

Adam Pally

#42. I feel like my convictions and my passions come from my very personal experience and the life that I've led. I feel the very naturally tendency to stand up for and use my voice for the things that I know about and the things that I feel passionate about.

America Ferrera

#43. Integrity is the integration of ideals, convictions, standards, beliefs-and behavior. When our behavior is congruent with our professed values, when ideals and practice match up, we have integrity.

Nathaniel Branden

#44. The world is changing; people's morals and standards are changing. The Bible stays the same, so should our morals, standard and convictions. Raise the standard, live the standard & be the standard!

Joe Joe Dawson

#45. I'm actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.

Bono

#46. [It] is well and good when our convictions are based upon the "Thou shalts" and the "Thou shalt nots" of Scripture rather than our own ideas.

Billy Graham

#47. When I am once again whole, I shall visit those factory people; I have deep and abiding convictions concerning social action.

Anonymous

#48. What we need," he wrote, "is to turn out of colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of right; not young men who can make a good argument for either right or wrong, as their interest bids them.

Edmund Lester Pearson

#49. I love opposition that has convictions.

Frederick The Great

#50. There's always a backlash when you challenge people's convictions and their heroes.

Pink

#51. We become human only in the company of other human beings. And this involves both opening our hearts and giving voice to our deepest convictions ... When we shrink from the world, our souls shrink, too.

Paul Rogat Loeb

#52. Having Christian convictions can't ever negate having Christ's compassion.

Ann Voskamp

#53. I don't think my religious convictions should be held against me.

Tony Abbott

#54. If you have political convictions ... keep 'em to yourself

Johnny Cash

#55. Convictions and the man--it seems they're two different things in many ways. Maybe in many ways I'm guilty before them!...We're all guilty, we're all guilty, and...if only we were all convinced of it!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#56. As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.

Jim Crace

#57. If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

Mary Catherine Bateson

#58. I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.

David Ricardo

#59. It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point

Mary Roach

#60. Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people - if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are - you may have lost perspective.

Tim Kreider

#61. However, it must always remain a dialogue, and never an imposition of the church's own convictions and methods. Propose, not impose. To serve, and not to dominate.

Claudio Hummes

#62. Every [person] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits [his or her] convictions, but we must all protest.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#63. I'm a man of convictions. If you press me about how I feel about an issue, you're going to see my convictions.

Kirk Cameron

#64. He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.

Ambrose Bierce

#65. Confronting and undermining the narratives and ideas of extremism must therefore be one of our key tasks. To do this, we must retain the courage of our convictions in the face of extremism.

Jonas Gahr Store

#66. Those professions which are not so much involved in life itself as concerned with abstract truths are the most dangerous for the young man whose principles are not yet firm and whose convictions are not yet strong and unshakeable.

Karl Marx

#67. Cultural icons stand the test of time because they speak to our deeper convictions and ignite our dreams.

George Takei

#68. A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

G.K. Chesterton

#69. A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine elements.

Roseville Nidea

#70. I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#71. Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#72. Courage results when one's convictions are bigger than one's fears.

Orrin Woodward

#73. Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples' convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly.

Tony Judt

#74. We cannot preserve philanthropic and charitable values if we detach them completely from our fundamental personal beliefs and convictions.

Robert L. Payton

#75. There is really no practical help that one can offer; it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own convictions, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live.

Truman Capote

#76. We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Emil Cioran

#77. The arbitrary division between church and state ... is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions.

Francis Schaeffer

#78. Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives.

Ernst Hanfstaengl

#79. Conservatives don't need to change core convictions to embrace the growing support for equal rights for gay Americans.

Ken Mehlman

#80. Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

John Updike

#81. Put differently, we've made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table.

Scot McKnight

#82. Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers should lead the Democratic Party. They are the only Democrats with any convictions.

Evan Sayet

#83. I didn't have a solid opinion on the possibility of anyone's having psychic abilities or a fluency in reading auras, nor did I want to form an opinion about these things, to be one of those people with convictions about things they can't prove or disprove.

Catherine Lacey

#84. Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person's unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.

Gabor Mate

#85. - very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions - ? Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions

Friedrich Nietzsche

#86. The heart is long, very long in receiving the convictions that is forced upon it by reason ... affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight.

Abigail Adams

#87. Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#88. Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#89. This faculty is mother wit, the creative power through which man is capable of recognising likenesses and making them himself. We see it in children, in whom nature is more integral and less corrupted by convictions and prejudices, that the first faculty to emerge is that of seeing similarities.

John Eliot Gardiner

#90. Stand by your own honorable convictions before the putrid stench of others permanently stains you.

Hank Bracker

#91. We should resist the temptation to identify our religious convictions with the platform of a party or the platitudes of favored politicians.

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

#92. The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.

James Madison

#93. No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.

Aldo Leopold

#94. The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise
the carrying into practice of religious principles, and beliefs, and convictions.

Alan Keyes

#95. The people who are good at being civil often lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions often lack civility.

Martin E. Marty

#96. Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty.

Irvin D. Yalom

#97. I am a Muslim Arab, in my actions oriented very to the left, in my convictions.

Ahmed Ben Bella

#98. No one can become successful for you. It takes personal definitions, personal decisions, personal convictions, personal actions and personal responsibility to succeed in life.

Archibald Marwizi

#99. Whenever there is an organized movement to persuade people to believe or do something, whenever an effort is made to "propagate" a creed or set of opinions or convictions or to make people act as we want them to act, the means employed are called propaganda.

Edwin Way Teale

#100. What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.

Thomas Huxley