Moby Quotes

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy, and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

Faith: The opposite of dogmatism.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

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.

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere philosophy.

Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

What do we believe? Why do we believe it?

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

One person's religion is another person's cult.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

The sin of certainty leaves no room for the rest of us.

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

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

Dislike of another’s opinions and beliefs neither justifies our own nor makes us more certain of them: and to transfer the repugnance to the person himself is a mark of a vulgar mind.

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it's the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.

Both faith and cynicism make judgment too easy.