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Feminists who want to censor what they regard as harmful pornography have essentially the same motivation as other would-be censors: They want to use the power of the state to accomplish what they have been unable to achieve in the marketplace of ideas and images. The impulse to censor places no faith in the possibilities of democratic persuasion.

Susan Jacoby

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Susan Jacoby
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 4
Author
Journalist
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New York City
New York
Ideas
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Possibilities
Feminists
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Pornography
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More quotes by Susan Jacoby

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I can't imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.
Susan Jacoby
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I'm not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it's not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world.
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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hope is not a plan of action.
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
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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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The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization
Susan Jacoby
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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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If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.
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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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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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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I don't see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.
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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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 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'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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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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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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The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence.
Susan Jacoby