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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.

Susan Jacoby

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Susan Jacoby
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 4
Author
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Trouble
Anti
Truth
Lows
Virulent
Hard
Expectations
Rationalism
Losing
Intellectualism
Americans
Mixture
Intellectual
Mixtures
Danger
Capital
Serious
Cultural

More quotes by Susan Jacoby

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It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.
Susan Jacoby
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hope is not a plan of action.
Susan Jacoby
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I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.
Susan Jacoby
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one of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.
Susan Jacoby
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That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.
Susan Jacoby
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Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.
Susan Jacoby
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This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
Susan Jacoby
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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.
Susan Jacoby
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I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn't be able to vote and are inferior to whites.
Susan Jacoby
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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.
Susan Jacoby
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People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.
Susan Jacoby
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I'd be the last person in the world to deny that there are many people for whom faith is - can be a great sustaining force.
Susan Jacoby
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I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.
Susan Jacoby
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Every brand of religion maintains, and is, a permanent mechanism for transmitting ideas and values - whether one regards those values as admirable or ridiculous. Secularist organizations, with their generally looser, nonhierarchical structures, lack the power to hand down and disseminate their heritage in such a systematic way.
Susan Jacoby
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I don't deny that religion is very healthful to a lot of people. And as long as they don't try to convert me, I have, you know, nothing - and to interfere with the rights of people to believe other religions or to not believe in any religion at all - as long as they mind their own religion - perfectly all right with me...
Susan Jacoby
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The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.
Susan Jacoby
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I don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.
Susan Jacoby
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More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.
Susan Jacoby
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I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.
Susan Jacoby
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I wanted to know how much of conversion was forced - that is, forced in the sense that the Inquisition forced people to choose - forced Jews, let's say, and Muslims to choose conversion to Christianity or death. I wanted to see how much of conversion historically was forced in that way and how much of it was really a kind of persuasion.
Susan Jacoby