William Penn Quotes

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

No religion can be built on force.

My parents used to say faith wasn't something you could pretend about. It wasn't real unless it looked like faith and acted like faith.

God isn't afraid of our doubts; He's way more concerned when we fake it.

Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only.

Piety is the tinfoil of pretense.

... force is the natural ally of superstition, and superstition knows it well.

Be a hypocrite if you like, but don't talk like one.

He has not a single grain of conviction in him except in the abstract.

Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

One of the advantages of no longer running for public office is that I don’t have to pretend to be nice to people I dislike.

The word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.

I don't think there is a single character in 'The Graduate' that is not a phony, to one degree or another, except Benjamin and Elaine, and only in the scenes when they are alone together.

Jesus didn't die for us so we could pretend to be something we're not.

I don't like Drake as a person. He's just fake to me.

I loathe people who are disingenuous or inauthentic.

We're against hypocrisy, lies, bigotry, show business, insincerity, phonies, and fakers.

I just don't have a tolerance for people being fake, I don't think. Maybe especially when I think they have bad intentions.

I can't stand fake people. I can feel it when someone feigns it.

And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning. I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly, as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me, as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer, an evil, was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life; but I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life—a life of indulgence of desires—was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, “Life is evil and an absurdity,” referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

If thinking minds, questioning minds, doubting minds, are talking about faith, their whole life will become fake.

To change one's religion under the threat of force is no conversion but rather cowardice.