Uta Hagen Quotes

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you must think of the meaning more than the words - of the ideas more than the language.

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess commitment to some special or constricting idea.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

Extremism is born when the social-political situation creates pressure which threatens the community. However, there are religious justifications for political pressure. People legitimize the use of (Koranic) verses that Jews and Christians will always be the enemy of Islam. People use such verses without looking at the historical context of the verses. They always use it as if the enmity with Jews and Christian is permanent.

There are certain catchwords which have a marvelous charm to calm the breast political, a magic power to levitate the mind captivated by them, out of the regions of mere argument and recognition of facts. Such a hold do these words and the deified abstractions they cover have on the average man of the nineteenth century, that they and they alone are worshipped as the ultimate manifestation of goodness, beauty, and truth. To be opposed to these abstractions is to be condemned as blasphemous against the first principles of rectitude, moral and political.

Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness.

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

… some parties think that only the rules laid down by their doctrines are the right ones.

It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.

By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.

Society in general maintains such a vested interested in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die - or kill - than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular.

Adhesion to one idea is monomania; to few, slavery.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

Text without context is pretext.