52 Quotes by Susan Jacoby

I no more believe in the God of the Jews than I believe in any God.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I completely can’t understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it’s right.

Atheism is not a religion. One of the things, in fact, that atheism lacks are the kinds of rituals that religion does provide and I would be the first to say that.

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.