Ross Douthat Quotes

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

Mark, therefore, the ordinary theory of practical religion, what it leads to. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism. It is not religion. It is no better than atheism - a little less.

People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell.

We will keep a commitment to pluralism and not discriminate for or against Methodist or Mormons or Muslims or good people with no faith at all.

Going after what I believe in.

But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It's the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.

I never volunteer to talk about god or religion, but people feel compelled to talk about it.

Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.

You've got to love people, places, ideas; you've got to live with mind, body, soul; you've got to be committed; there is no life on the side-lines.

A faith gained in strength only when people were willing to lay down their lives for it.

I've had moments in my life where it was all out on the table. Everything I had. I'm okay with that, because I had a strong belief that what I was doing other people could believe in it, too, if I can get it just right.

Religion is civilization, the highest.

It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.

People don’t die because of loyalty.” They don’t?” She smiled. “Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?” Eddie shrugged. Better,” she said, “to be loyal to one another.

The hope of free people in a frightened world is the values which people put ahead of inventions when their backs are to the wall. These values are beauty, truth, goodness and having a faith, all of which are bombproof.

Liberals have lost the soul. We haven't recognized the necessity of defending our own system at the level of ideas. We have to get people to treat the idea of a free society as a civic religion or a faith. We need to fight for that faith.

The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn't really survive without.

We must distinguish between spirituality in general terms, which aims to make us better people, and religion. Adopting a religion remains optional, but becoming a better human being is essential.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?

You shall not steal! You shall not kill! Such words were once called holy; before them people bowrd their knees and heads, and removed their shoes. But I ask you: where have there ever been better thieves and killers in the world than such holy words have been? Is there not in all of life itself - robbing and killing? And when such words were called holy, was not truth itself thereby - killed?

A lot of people believe a lot of things. People also believe in a lot of ideas or hold tight to a lot of ideologies and beliefs.

I wanna do the very best job I can to fulfill the trust and faith that people have in me.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

As is well know, I, ah..regard myself as a religious man, yet I belong to no church. I'm an able soldier yet I abhor armies. I can even add that I've been introduced to hundreds of women but never married. in other words no one's ever talked me into anything.