194 Quotes by Jonathan Sacks

The seventeenth century was the dawn of an age of secularisation. The twenty-first century will be the start of an age of desecularisation.

Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it’s more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.

God’s forgiveness allows us to be honest with ourselves. We recognize our imperfections, admit our failures, and plead to God for clemency.

God does not want us to understand the suffering of the innocent but to fight for a world in which the innocent no longer suffer.

Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: ‘Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.’6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.

The evidence shows that religious people – defined by regular attendance at a place of worship – actually do make better neighbors.

The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.

As Shakespeare said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’4.

People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism – even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn’t always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media.