Quotes by Wendy Kaminer - Page 1

Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Causes
Insult
Stupidity
Copy Quote
When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Angel
Children
Heaven
Copy Quote
Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Brain
Jargon
Left
Copy Quote
Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Education
Learning
People
Teaching
Copy Quote
There are only two states of being in the world of codependency - recovery and denial.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Denial
Recovery
Two
Copy Quote
We don't cut off the hands of thieves or castrate rapists. Why must we murder murderers?
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Cutting
Hands
Thieves
Copy Quote
Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Faith
Essentials
Reality
Copy Quote
As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Attitude
Absolutism
Camille
Copy Quote
Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Patriotism
Doe
Liberty
Copy Quote
The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Affirmation
Doubt
Real
Copy Quote
Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Religion
Atheism
Religious
Copy Quote
Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Atheism
Religious
Trying
Copy Quote
What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Expression
Might
Self
Copy Quote
In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Religion
Causes
Rewards
Stupidity
Copy Quote
Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack (on the World Trade Center and Pentagon), we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Lessons
Never Forget
World
Copy Quote
In this climate - with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace - making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Angel
Atheism
Fun
Copy Quote
Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Atheist
People
Religious
Copy Quote
For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Execution
Obscurity
People
Copy Quote
Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles ... take a hard line on intellectualism.... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Atheism
Forgiving
Views
Copy Quote
If all issues are personalized, we lose our capacity to entertain ideas, to generalize from our own or someone else's experiences, to think abstractly. We substitute sentimentality for thought.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Ideas
Issues
Thinking
Copy Quote
I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Atheism
Thinking
Worry
Copy Quote
The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Belief
Political
Thinking
Copy Quote
I don't think of myself as having a particular role. I'm lucky enough to be able to make my living essentially by expressing my opinions. But, you know, I think the world would manage quite well if I weren't doing it.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Lucky
Thinking
World
Copy Quote
One of the reasons I'm drawn to civil libertarianism as opposed to communitarianism is that I don't worry so much about the rights of the majority; a majority is quite capable of enforcing and protecting its own rights.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Libertarianism
Reason
Worry
Copy Quote
Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best - monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Doe
Giving
Political
Copy Quote
The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination with near-death experiences and the growing belief by Americans -- 34 percent of them -- in reincarnation are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Fascination
Growing
Pseudoscience
Copy Quote
I don't see a direct conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of communities, because I don't perceive of communities as having rights in a way that individuals do. Communities certainly have interests, but they don't exactly have rights.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Community
Conflict
Individual
Copy Quote
The phenomenal success of the recovery movement reflects two simple truths that emerge in adolescence: all people love to talk about themselves, and most people are mad at their parents. You don't have to be in denial to doubt that truths like these will set us free.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Recovery
Simple
Two
Copy Quote
It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Atheism
Intellectual
Matter
Copy Quote
I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Law
People
Religious
Copy Quote
Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice - a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Opportunity
Democracy
Hearing
Vices
Copy Quote
I do what I do because I have a compulsion to hold forth. I don't spend a lot of time, if any, thinking about the effect my work is going to have on the world. And I have an abiding mistrust of people who think that they're going to change the world. I think that people who think that they're going to change the world are the kind of people who put bombs on airplanes.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Airplane
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
There are, however, exceptions to this reliance on feelings as evidence of truth: if, for instance, your feelings lead to disbelief instead of belief, they're apt to be dismissed as some form of denial. This is not a common problem. Usually intellectualism, not feeling reality, is blamed for disbelief. But, some angel experts suggest, there may be emotional as well as intellectual barriers to belief: unwillingness to believe in angels can reflect low self-esteem.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Angel
Believe
Self Esteem
Copy Quote
It's easy to sell good news like this, and the authors confidently rely on classic fallacious arguments. They argue by declaration, which is what makes the books so amusing. In matter-of-fact, authoritative tones, the authors tell us how plants and human beings exchange energy - or they describe what angels look like, whether or how they're sexed, how they communicate with human beings, and how they differ from ghosts. Readers might be expected to wonder, How do they know?
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Angel
Atheism
Book
Copy Quote
What makes fantastic declarations believable is, in part, the vehemence with which they're proffered. Again, in the world of spirituality as well as of pop psychology, intensity of personal belief is evidence of truth. It is considered very bad form - even abuse - to challenge the veracity of any personal testimony that might be offered in a twelve-step group or on a talk show, unless the testimony itself is equivocal... Whatever sells, whatever many people believe strongly, must be true.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Believe
People
Psychology
Copy Quote
There is this fashionable progressive notion that everything is so completely political that the idea we could have some sort of neutral legal process is practically utopian - because we all know that the more money you have, the more rights you can exercise in this society. But I don't think that you deal with income inequality by limiting the First Amendment rights of affluent people. I'd rather see people screw around with the tax code to redistribute wealth a little bit than screw around with the First Amendment.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Exercise
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
There's a way in which all of these grazers at the spirituality buffet are performing a service, because you could argue that grazing leads to a kind of tolerance. People who incorporate teachings from a lot of different traditions into their own belief systems are going to be more tolerant than people who confine themselves within the strict boundaries of one particular religion. Does it contribute to our confusion? I don't know if it contributes to confusion so much as it is evidence of a certain kind of silliness and shallowness.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Confusion
People
Teaching
Copy Quote
Jerry Falwell knows who caused the terrorist attack on America: the ACLU. "The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this," he declared on the 700 Club, because, he explained, the ACLU, abetted by the federal courts is responsible for "throwing God out of the public square (and) the public schools." This is a familiar charge and a false one. God is still present in the public schools, where students are free to pray, alone or in groups, so long as their prayers aren't officially sponsored and don't infringe on anyone's freedom not to pray.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Prayer
School
Squares
Copy Quote
The scarcest resource these days is reason. What's certainly striking about American culture today is the great hostility toward science and the decline of respect for rational scientific thinking. People seem to think that we are ruled by the scientific method and that we overvalue reason. If there was ever a period when we overvalued reason, I think that it was probably extremely brief. What I see now is a great deal of superstition, as much superstition as there has ever been. There are probably more people who believe in guardian angels than who understand the law of gravity.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Angel
Believe
Thinking
Copy Quote
Religions, of course, have their own demanding intellectual traditions, as Jesuits and Talmudic scholars might attest.... But, in its less rigorous, popular forms, religion is about as intellectually challenging as the average self-help book. (Like personal development literature, mass market books about spirituality and religion celebrate emotionalism and denigrate reason. They elevate the "truths" of myths and parables over empiricism.) In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.
Wendy Kaminer / Lawyer
Average
Book
Self
Copy Quote

Related Lawyer Authors

Xu Zhiyong
Lawyer
Friday, Mar 02, 1973
Winnie Ewing
Lawyer
Wednesday, Jul 10, 1929
William Rawle
Lawyer
Saturday, Apr 28, 1759
Tuesday, Apr 12, 1836
William Mulock
Lawyer
Thursday, Jan 19, 1843
Sunday, Oct 01, 1944
William Kunstler
Lawyer
Monday, Jul 07, 1919
Monday, Sep 04, 1995
William H. Hastie
Lawyer
Thursday, Nov 17, 1904
Wednesday, Apr 14, 1976
William H. Ginsburg
Lawyer
Thursday, Mar 25, 1943
Monday, Apr 01, 2013
William B. Travis
Lawyer
Tuesday, Aug 01, 1809
Sunday, Mar 06, 1836
Wesley J. Smith
Lawyer
Wendy Kaminer
Lawyer
Wednesday, Dec 28, 1949
Wendy Davis
Lawyer
Thursday, May 16, 1963
Wendell Willkie
Lawyer
Thursday, Feb 18, 1892
Sunday, Oct 08, 1944
Wendell Phillips
Lawyer
Friday, Nov 29, 1811
Saturday, Feb 02, 1884
Wallace Nesbitt
Lawyer
Thursday, May 13, 1858
Monday, Apr 07, 1930
Viet D. Dinh
Lawyer
Thursday, Feb 22, 1968

View All Lawyer Quotes

Top Authors

Aristotle
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Billy Graham
Professional Wrestler
Monday, Jun 07, 1943
Marcus Aurelius
Roman Emperor
Saturday, Apr 26, 0121
Friday, Mar 17, 0180
John Muir
Author
Saturday, Apr 21, 1838
Thursday, Dec 24, 1914
Edgar Allan Poe
Author
Thursday, Jan 19, 1809
Sunday, Oct 07, 1849
Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778
Steve Jobs
Entrepreneur
Thursday, Feb 24, 1955
Wednesday, Oct 05, 2011
W. Edwards Deming
Statistician
Sunday, Oct 14, 1900
Monday, Dec 20, 1993
Walt Disney
Animator
Thursday, Dec 05, 1901
Thursday, Dec 15, 1966
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 21, 1772
Friday, Jul 25, 1834
Ronald Reagan
40Th US President
Monday, Feb 06, 1911
Saturday, Jun 05, 2004
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Carl Sagan
Astronomer
Friday, Nov 09, 1934
Friday, Dec 20, 1996
Mae West
Actress
Thursday, Aug 17, 1893
Saturday, Nov 22, 1980
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893

View All Authors

Wendy Kaminer Quotes - Page 1

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Lawyer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Lawyer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page