I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
I am all in favor of the skeptical mind. Do not believe anything unless you have experienced it. Do not believe anything - go on questioning, however long it takes.
The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.
Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.
Don't believe everything you read.
It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.
Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of any relaitonship is your responsibility. You do not have to passively accept what is brought to you. You can choose.
The concept of loyalty is distorted when it is understood to mean blind acceptance. It is correctly interpreted when it is assumed to cover honest criticism.
And the faith that grows out of questioning is stronger than the faith born of blind acceptance. It can withstand the shocks of circumstance. Only he who questions the universe and questions it in utter honesty can grow in his comprehension of the truth.
The intelligent employer encourages challenge, questioning--not blind acceptance and "our Leader knows best" acclaim.
See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don't be lazy to think.
Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.
or simply:
