Susan Jacoby Quotes

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.

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.

hope is not a plan of action.

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

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.

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.

The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.

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.

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.

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.

God Bless America started to become an almost ritualistic incantation at the end of political speeches really with Ronald Reagan. It appears occasionally before, but it was not that common. And of course since it was a song that wasn't written by Irving Berlin until the 20th century (laughter), none of the 19th century presidents said God Bless America at the end of speeches, either. I think that the symbolism which suggests that everybody is religious and that even presidents who believe in church and state feel obliged to do this.

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.

The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization

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.

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.

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' . . . ?

At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.