Pat Buckley Quotes

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists.

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

It is in the uncomprisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma that the danger lies.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth".

Only an ideologue deals with the world as he would wish it to be, as opposed to the world as it is.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

No, I'm not a scientologist.

I have an intense dislike of doctrines, because you will always end up eating your words.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.

When people feel a certain religion claims to have all the answers, that's what turns them off.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.