Susan Jacoby famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Tolerance #Roles #Levels
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

#Truth #Expectations #Intellectual
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

#Afterlife #Citizens #Earth
The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization
-- Susan Jacoby

#Organization #Government #Social
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

#Brain #Belief #Natural
It is hard to think of conversion as a blinding light on the road to Damascus, or as a highly spiritual or intellectual process, when the light comes from a flickering television; the voice of the deity is Bishop Sheen and you have drilled your father on his catechism answers...I was troubled at a young age by the idea that pouring water over someone's head could change both his relationship to God...
-- Susan Jacoby

#Spiritual #Women #Father
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

#Religious #Children #Women
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

#Sex #Intelligent #Attention
I have always regarded the development of the individual as the only legitimate goal of education.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Education #Goal #Development
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

#Past #Years #Two
Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Hands #Organization #Ideas
hope is not a plan of action.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Hope #Thinking #Action
Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful ***** have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Motivation #Ideas #Feminist
The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.
-- Susan Jacoby

#History #Causes #Groups
Whether you are religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer no more.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Religious #Grieving #Suffering
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

#Believe #Media #Two
At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Women #Heart #Emotional
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

#Religious #Atheist #War
There could be no more powerful argument against mixing religion and government than the success of independent African American churches in placing racial segregation and discrimination on a reluctant nation's social agenda. Would black churches have been able to take the lead in the struggle had they been dependent on funds doled out for 'faith-based initiatives' . . . ?
-- Susan Jacoby

#Powerful #Struggle #Independent
Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.
-- Susan Jacoby

#Disappointment #Writing #Simple
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

#Religious #Leader #Catholic
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

#Art #Real #Women

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