Wendy 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. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.

Wendy Kaminer

#6. 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

#7. I don't really consider myself a celebrity. I consider myself more of a role model.

Lisa Leslie

#8. There are only two states of being in the world of codependency - recovery and denial.

Wendy Kaminer

#9. Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.

Wendy Kaminer

#10. When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.

Wendy Kaminer

#11. 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

#12. Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.

Wendy Kaminer

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. How is it you've never married?" A soft splash. "It's an easy enough thing. Every morning I wake up, go about my day, and return to bed at night without having recited marriage vows. After several years, I have the trick of it down.

Tessa Dare

#16. 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

#17. It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#18. 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

#19. The view we took at the time and we take it now is that the war was justified legally because he [Saddam Hussein] remained in breach of UN resolutions.

Tony Blair

#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. The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.

Tennessee Williams

#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. I think it's very important to get ego out of the room. I think it's important to realize it takes two hands to clap - stop the pointing, stop the blame game. I think we've seen enough of that, I think the country is tired of it. I think they want to see Washington function, they want to see action.

Nikki Haley

#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. 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

#26. 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

#27. I didn't grow up listening to hip-hop since I was six.

Ryan Lewis

#28. 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

#29. A thing not structured and organized contains more information, because it is more difficult to describe

Tor Norretranders

#30. 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

#31. We don't cut off the hands of thieves or castrate rapists. Why must we murder murderers?

Wendy Kaminer

#32. As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.

Wendy Kaminer

#33. 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

#34. Friends have all things in common.

Plato

#35. Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.

Wendy Kaminer

#36. 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

#37. If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that's business. I'm doing it because I'm serving you; I'm not doing it because I want to be universal.

Jamie Dimon

#38. The golden rule for the Sabbath is cease from what is necessary and to embrace what gives life.

Ken Shigematsu

#39. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove.

G.K. Chesterton

#40. 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

#41. Art is images you carry. You cannot carry nature with you, but you carry images of nature. When you go out to make a picture you find you are moved by something which is in agreement with an image you already held within yourself.

Frederick Sommer

#42. They found me at the kitchen table. Derek said, "There's something we need to tell you," and from the look on Andrew's face, I think he expected Derek to say he'd gotten me pregnant.

Kelley Armstrong