Quotes About Beliefs

When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts ... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.

The brain is a stubborn organ. Once its primary set of beliefs has been established, the brain finds it difficult to integrate opposing ideas and beliefs. This has profound consequences for individuals and society and helps to explain why some people cannot abandon destructive beliefs, be they religious, political or psychological.

There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. Religious beliefs are sacred to people and at all times should be respected and honored. As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.

While I think in principle people should not have irrational beliefs, I should say that as a matter of fact, it is people who hold what I regard as completely irrational beliefs who are among the most effective moral actors in the world, in many respects. They're among the worst, but also among the best, even though the moral beliefs are ostensibly the same.

An extremely important part of our work toward emotional growth and change will come from examining our belief systems regarding all areas of life. To gain the courage to be yourself, you need to address the beliefs that are keeping you stuck where you are. What beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes are you holding onto even though they no longer enhance your life? It is possible to free yourself from worn-out beliefs and acquire ones that bring happiness, strength, and self-esteem. What we believe we may become.

Listen to me: Life is not about principles; it`s about happiness.` `But if you don`t have any principles, and if you don`t have faith, you can`t be happy at all,` said Kadife. `That`s true. But in a brutal country like ours, where human life is cheap, it`s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.` `Actually, it`s the other way round. In a poor country, people`s sole consolation comes from their beliefs.

If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.

We can be confident that action which is in accord with a few basic beliefs cannot be wrong and can at least testify to the values we will need to cultivate. These are the beliefs that the human race is a family that has inherited a place on the earth in common, that its members have an obligation to work toward sharing it so that none is deprived of the elementary needs for life, and that all have a responsibility to leave it undegraded for those who follow.

You have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people's beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.

No one who is in business for profit can foist his or her beliefs on a workforce that includes many people who do not share those beliefs.

Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.

Some of the beliefs and legends bequethed to us by Antquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and wether the similarity between them may not point to the exestience of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.

The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.

It is widely assumed that beliefs in personal determination of outcomes create a sense of efficacy and power, whereas beliefs that outcomes occur regardless of what one does result in apathy

I absolutely believe that people should show respect to everybody, regardless of their lifestyle, regardless of their beliefs, religious beliefs or any other kind of belief.

Our negative thoughts are valuable messages to us about our deeper fears and negative attitudes. These usually are so basic to our thinking and feeling that we don't realize they are beliefs at all. We assume that they are simply "the way life is." We may be consciously affirming and visualizing prosperity, but if our unconscious belief is that we don't deserve it, then we won't create it. Once we become aware of our core negative beliefs, they begin to heal.

I have a list of universal beliefs, and they are amazing beliefs, like, "No one cares" or "You don't care about me"; "I should be successful" or "I'm not successful"; "I don't have enough money"; "I'm too tall or thin or fat"; "I shouldn't have done it" - oh, my goodness, they go on and on and on.

If you discuss the beliefs of Christianity with the village diviner, the medicine man, he will say the white man must be extremely stupid. The white man must be profoundly troubled - probably torn by a huge guilt connected to how he treated the ancestors - to think that villagers would buy the idea that someone died on the cross for us. They would say these beliefs are evidence that the white people killed someone of great importance, probably a diviner and a healer. If you kill a healer, you must make amends by appeasing the healer's spirit.

Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and take them, without question, for the absolute truth.

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

There was a man named Robert Dear who in court said he was a warrior for the babies, whose ex-wife talked about his Christian beliefs motivating his desire to attack and murder three people, including a police officer, in Colorado.That man is a Christian. He`s an avowed Christian. He appears to have acted on those Christian beliefs to undertake that act of violence.

There is no reason to not trust your process, no reason to get frustrated, no reason to criticize, or judge others, nothing wrong with getting old, or not being able to get pregnant, or being handicapped, or being short or tall or gay, or injured, or divorced or married to an idiot, or with Christianity or Judaism or Islam, or indigenous beliefs, or pollution, crime, war, Bush, etc. When this understanding grows, we realize where we're at now is just as perfect as wherever we could possibly get to.

Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge

Candidates With Deeply Held Christian Beliefs Are Unfit and Disqualified From Serving As A Federal Judge.

Men are made uneasy; they flinch; they cannot bear the sudden light; a general restlessness supervenes; the face of society is disturbed, or perhaps convulsed; old interests and old beliefs have been destroyed before new ones have been created. These symptoms are the precursors of revolution; they have preceded all the great changes through which the world has passed.

For a deeply religious purpose, there are people who do not personally believe that abortion is acceptable. I understand that. But this is a country where we don't impose religious beliefs on the entire country. This is a country where we accept differences of opinion.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

Something that I wanted to do through the film is try to explore the roots of belief, because everything has to do with beliefs. When I studied the side of the rationalists and the skeptics, and the side of the believers and so-called psychics, I found out that both of them, no matter what they claim to do, behave in a very similar way. They only accepted what confirmed their previous positions, and tended to reject everything that put them at risk.

In fact, the U.S. military has bent over backwards to respect the religious beliefs of some very dangerous fanatics who want to kill us.

Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don't be upset when others decide you're an asshole.

While they came from a variety of religious backgrounds and held a wide variety of religious beliefs, each of our presidents in his own way has placed a special trust in God.

Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.

Let me fill you in on a few of my beliefs. First of all, I believe that I'll dress the way I want and I'll act the way I want. But most importantly, these fans don't just look at me for my appearance, they love me for what's on the inside.

I had so many beliefs against being a singer or what it takes. There was a lot of pain associated with that. The rejection of it all. I lived in a rejection state of mind. Not because of my voice; the mike never rejected me. It was harboring all those bad memories of being broke. It teaches you your worth. Nothing good comes from that.

I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We have been in jail for years.

Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It's a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it's inside you it's too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it's your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn't trigger, it doesn't need to.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

Our beliefs, our values shape the way we look out at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were here, placed here by God, that this - all of this creation is for us, it's for us to go and occupy, dominate and exploit, then we will proceed to do that.

India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.

Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom.

Our sacred beliefs have been made pencils / names of cities / gas stations / My knee is wounded so badly that I limp constantly / Anger is my crutch / I hold myself upright with it / My knee is wounded / see / How I Am Still Walking.

The difficulty with humanity's previous attempts at reinventing itself is that we've always started with behaviors rather than with beliefs.

You threw everything away."I bring a hand up to touch her face,to wipe the rain from her eyelashes."Your entire life-your beliefs...Why would you do that for me?" June has never looked more beautiful than she does now,unadorned and honest,vulnerable yet invincible.When lightning streaks over the sky,her dark eyes shine like gold."Because you were right,"she whispers."About all of it.

The right to criticize: the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood... Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.

I was shamed.My son, Bill, who was 14 come to me and said: "Mother, you've been professing that you're an atheist for a long time now. Well, I don't believe in God either, but every day in school I'm forced to say prayers, and I feel like a hypocrite. Why should I be compelled to betray my beliefs?" I couldn't answer him.