Top 42 Susan Jacoby Quotes
#1. I no more believe in the God of the Jews than I believe in any God.
Susan Jacoby
#2. Religious education is only valuable intellectually, if the child is educated in a religion versus [just] about a religion. I don't believe you can have both.
Susan Jacoby
#3. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
Susan Jacoby
#4. One of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.
Susan Jacoby
#5. High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.
Susan Jacoby
#6. The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.
Susan Jacoby
#7. This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
Susan Jacoby
#8. I don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.
Susan Jacoby
#9. For one thing, the Catholic Church in particular has this one thing - confession - in which you could go, confess to a priest and obtain absolution of your sins. And there was a routine and a ritual and I think - I think that it did help.
Susan Jacoby
#10. I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.
Susan Jacoby
#11. If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.
Susan Jacoby
#13. If you chose a particular religion, you were siding with the government religion of whatever region you were in. That's never been true in America, but also, the United States also has so many more immigrant groups which also tends to imply more religious diversity right away.
Susan Jacoby
#14. I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.
Susan Jacoby
#15. More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.
Susan Jacoby
#16. I still do find the prayers of the Kaddish quite moving, and I just substitute in my mind nature, although that's what the founders did in a lot of their documents, too. They substituted nature or providence for God. I think that's what I do in my head with Jewish God.
Susan Jacoby
#17. That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.
Susan Jacoby
#18. Atheism is not a religion. One of the things, in fact, that atheism lacks are the kinds of rituals that religion does provide and I would be the first to say that.
Susan Jacoby
#19. My atheism doesn't define my day-to-day life at all. But I realize - and maybe it is because, unlike people who sort of stay comfortably in a religion, I had to do a lot of thinking and reading before I realized that I was an atheist.
Susan Jacoby
#20. I believe that whether one believes in God or not is - it's very central to who I am.
Susan Jacoby
#21. The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence.
Susan Jacoby
#22. I don't ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can't imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things.
Susan Jacoby
#23. Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.
Susan Jacoby
#24. I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here.
Susan Jacoby
#25. Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who ... even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.
Susan Jacoby
#26. I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.
Susan Jacoby
#27. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.
Susan Jacoby
#28. One of the interesting things is is that Judaism was very attractive to the Roman aristocracy.
Susan Jacoby
#29. A person can be religious and still respect secular values and not talk about Jesus all the time as though every American believed in Jesus.
Susan Jacoby
#30. If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.
Susan Jacoby
#31. It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.
Susan Jacoby
#32. I have always regarded the development of the individual as the only legitimate goal of education.
Susan Jacoby
#33. I have received many touching letters and emails from people who live in the most religious parts of the country, in places like rural Texas, saying it is so good to see someone be able to say I am an atheist without shame.
Susan Jacoby
#34. The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization
Susan Jacoby
#35. At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.
Susan Jacoby
#36. The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.
Susan Jacoby
#37. One of the reasons there are largely Catholic and largely Protestant regions of Germany today is that people did sort themselves out geographically.
Susan Jacoby
#38. I completely can't understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it's right.
Susan Jacoby
#39. It's something fundamental to me, human rights that people are equal under law simply because they are human beings. And I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed, for instance, as Orthodox Jews do, that women are unclean during their menstrual periods.
Susan Jacoby
#40. I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn't be able to vote and are inferior to whites.
Susan Jacoby
#41. People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.
Susan Jacoby
#42. I'm not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it's not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world.
Susan Jacoby
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
