An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.
Democratic societies can no longer give religious fanatics a free hand to abuse and murder non believers. Such action betrays contempt for the basic human rights which animate any democracy with meaning.
Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.
Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.
Mormons invented themselves just as other religious and ethnic groups invented themselves. But Mormons did so in such a singularly impressive way that we will probably always remain baffled as to how exactly it happened.
The free world cannot afford to accept any form of extremism, whether it is fascism, racism or religious extremism.
It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever...
I got my start in the 'New York Times' because I used to read Stuart Elliot, the advertising columns. I still do. And I read him so religiously, I wanted to work for him before I died.
I'm a religious man," he said. "I don't believe in a particular God, but even so one can have a faith, something beyond the limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element of built-in faith, although it claims to be a science and not merely an ide...
The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an...
Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We...
It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.
I've been thinking of something your father said - that the true measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it. He was talking about freedom - fighting for liberty. But I believe 'tis the same for love as war.
conservative n. A person who possesses an underdeveloped taste for tyranny. liberal n. A person who believes in liberty, but only for the state.
If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of e...
But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.
Most people today don't feel that Barack Obama is on our side. We sense he's incapable of doing what Roosevelt did, of loving his country so much that he was willing to run great risks in order to advance its cause, to free others from a new Dark Age...
We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact!
The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to come to their shores, it certai...
I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind, and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women [...]: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of ...
The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppres...
