Belief Erosion Quotes

Journalists want me to keep repeating myself and they don't see that it would make people think I didn't believe myself. If what I say isn't worth believing when I say it, what additional value would it have from being repeated? If I were to repeat that statement this afternoon, in two weeks the newspapers would all be clamoring to have me say it again. Then pretty soon I should have to say it every day, and nobody would believe it.

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

I don't trust politicians. I think that by the time they've made it, with the concessions they've had to make in that position, I don't believe they still have the beliefs they had at the root.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

Religions die slowly.

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called in question.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.

If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

You see something very important is happening. Personality is being eaten out, and with that the idealism that always motivated an anarchist movement - the belief in something, the ideal that there is something worth fighting for.

As cities grow and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.