Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.
If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.
I stood up as best I could to their disgusting stupidity and brutality, but I did not, of course, manage to beat them at their own game. It was a fight to the bitter end, one in which I was not defending ideals or beliefs but simply my own self.
My own belief is that most people are trying to do their best. It doesn't mean they have no nasty side, or that they don't have a bad temper, or that they have never done anything they feel ashamed of. But fiction operates on people waking up trying ...
I know what I need to work on; I know my weaknesses, but I have that work ethic to improve every day. I have that want to be the best player at my position, and I have the belief in myself that one day that will come true.
Influence is best measured not only by military hardware and GDP, but also by other people's perceptions that we, the United States, are using our power legitimately. That belief - that we are acting in the interests of the global commons and in acco...
What if we saw differences in cultures, in moral choices, and in belief as reasons to engage people instead of excuses to disengage and quickly exit?
Compassion doesn't arise from the belief that the evil in the world is somebody else's fault or that it is a result of poor choices a suffering person has made.
Aligning your values and beliefs to your behaviour, increases your chances of being effective at living a fulfilling life without the stress of guilt-consciousness, internal strife or internal conflict
Parker: She believed, absolutely, that each person, each heart, had a counterpart—had a mate. A rightness. She’d always believed it, and understood that unshakable belief was a reason she was good at what she did.
Sometimes people's spiritual ideas become fixed and they use them against those who don't share their beliefs - in effect, becoming fundamentalist. It's very dangerous - the finger of righteous indignation pointing at someone who is identified as bad...
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
I have an unexplainable belief that I will never cause harm or be harmed while at sea. Because of this, I feel secure at sea: I feel secure in the ice, I feel secure in the storms, and I feel secure in confrontations.
We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure.
On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives a...
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
According to the belief, molecules closer together than 200 nanometers could not be told apart with focused light. This is because, in a packed molecular crowd, the molecules shout out their fluorescence simultaneously, causing their signal, their vo...
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
A lot of people are living in a dream world - they want to deny that aging occurs or believe it doesn't have to occur. They'll hold on to this belief until the moment they die. The reality will eventually hit them.
In terms of companies, they must stand for something bigger. They must be dedicated to something larger than financial results. I reject the Milton Friedman belief that a company's sole responsibility is to the shareholders.
