When I was smuggling, I learned that some men believe everything and some nothing.
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Quotes tagged ‘Why we believe what we believe’
Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem … but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers chan…
Love is from another realm. We cannot manufacture it on demand. Nor can we subdue it when it appears. Love is not our choice to make.
"For the human brain," Edmond explained, "any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with 'insufficient data,' and so our brains invent the data-- offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order--creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reass…
Spiritual beliefs are etched deeply on our psyches at a young age by those we love and trust most -- our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders. Therefore, any religious shifts occur over generations, and not without great angst, and often bloodshed.
The only problem was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn't take up the whole of your life No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like th…
I’m horrified at the prospect of the most insightful people in their fields thinking, 'That's something I should comment on. Nah, what's the point? Too much downside.'
There's a lot of concern about "fake news" lately. That is a real problem, but there's also the opposite problem: true things that aren't being said.
One of my good friends said, ‘Peter, do you realize how crazy this is, how everybody thinks this is crazy?’ I was like: ‘Well, why am I wrong? What’s substantively wrong with this?’ And it all got referred back to ‘Everybody thinks Trump’s really crazy.’ So it’s like there’s a shortcut, which is: ‘I…
I saw an article about a guy who plays blues—a black guy who hangs out with the Ku Klux Klan. So I watched him, like, what is this guy doing? He made sense. He said, "Listen. If you just sit down and talk to a person and just listen to him, I guarantee you that you have something in common." And at…
This is what scares establishment media types more than anything, not that people are spreading bullshit but that they are no longer in control of what bullshit gets spread.
But some people want to believe that Trump can be tricked into following any old schmuck that uses the right hashtags. Some people want to believe that he’s just some dope that somehow, without really trying, has bullshitted his way into the presidency. But neither case is true, and the progressives…
There are nowadays so many ways of accessing information on the Internet without ever coming across the informed contribution of journalism. It is so important, then, that our children - all of our citizens - be encouraged to think critically rather than merely reproduce the information pushed towar…
A new politics of fear, resentment and prejudice against those who are not ‘like us’ requires the capacity to critique, which an early exposure to the themes and methods of philosophy can bring.
Souls are not saved in bundles. Love is the necessary force.
What changes people is relationships. Somebody willing to walk through the shadow of the valley of adolescence with them.
It was horrifying. As a little kid, you’re absolutely vulnerable to what these powerful preachers and other adults are telling you. They control your life, and as far as you know, the world. You don’t understand that it’s a little group of mostly uneducated people huddling in a little church that pe…
They’re not monsters. They want what we want: safety, security, health, and wealth. It’s not even us vs. them. It’s just us.
People like me––gay people, undocumented people, undocumented gay people––are not ‘coming out.’ We’re just letting you in, and, in the process, asking you to find yourselves in us.