Robert Bellah Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. We're all turkeys! Some of us are running around with our heads cut off, some of us are flapping our wings that hard we're close to flying. But nothing is an eagle bar God ...

Phil Collins

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

Robert Neelly Bellah

#5. Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get hundreds of millions of users. That's the scale that I am always trying to play to.

Reid Hoffman

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Freedom isn't a static point. It's spectrum from absolute to none at all, and is usually inversely proportional to safety.

M.L. Wulff

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

Robert Neelly Bellah

#10. And her voice cut through the noise like a scythe through a poodle.

Daniel O'Malley

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. As for those who seek the transcendental Reality, without name, without form, contemplating the Unmanifested, beyond the reach of thought and of feeling, 4 with their senses subdued and mind serene and striving for the good of all beings, they too will verily come unto me.

Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

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

Robert Neelly Bellah

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Drinking in a honky tonk, just kicking hippies asses and raising hell.

Jerry Jeff Walker

#18. 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

#19. You'll always meet someone new, encounter something odd. That's the peculiar thing about life. Everything will make sense after it happens in the end. Everything will be clear, fresh, as if looking through glass. Crazy, isn't it?

Serena Winter

#20. Boiled food is life,' Levi-Strauss writes, 'roast food death.' He reports finding countless examples in the world's folklore of 'cauldrons of immortality,' but not a single example of a 'spit of immortality.

Michael Pollan

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. It's alive!" she screamed. The

Harper Lee

#24. Pain leaves a mark, the degree depending on the person and the event.

Chevy Stevens

#25. When my father began his work in the 1970s it was a very different EU. I pay tribute to what he did. But it has now become a very different proposition: the United States of Europe.

Boris Johnson

#26. How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.

Blaise Pascal

#27. In proportion as we perceive and embrace the truth do we become just, heroic, magnanimous, divine.

William Lloyd Garrison