52 Quotes by Susan Jacoby

I think people who love each other and live together and have children together need to agree on the things that are most important in life.

Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter writes. “Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: ‘Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!’”5.

If you believe in what I do, which is secular humanism, I would find it extremely difficult to live with someone – not to love someone – but to live with somebody and build a life of someone who disagreed with me on something so fundamental.

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.

I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.

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.

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

I don’t ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can’t imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things.

I still do find the prayers of the Kaddish quite moving, and I just substitute in my mind nature, although that’s what the founders did in a lot of their documents, too. They substituted nature or providence for God. I think that’s what I do in my head with Jewish God.