Top 140 Jonathan Sacks Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “No great achiever – even those who made it seem easy – ever succeeded without hard work.”

— Jonathan Sacks

2. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”

— Jonathan Sacks

3. “Faith is not a certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.”

— Jonathan Sacks

4. “Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share.”

— Jonathan Sacks

5. “True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.”

— Jonathan Sacks

6. “Follow your passion. Nothing – not wealth, success, accolades or fame – is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don’t enjoy.”

— Jonathan Sacks

7. “The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.”

— Jonathan Sacks

8. “The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”

— Jonathan Sacks

9. “Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.”

— Jonathan Sacks

10. “God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.”

— Jonathan Sacks

11. “It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.”

— Jonathan Sacks

12. “Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?”

— Jonathan Sacks

13. “There’s always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.”

— Jonathan Sacks

14. “Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity, fun and joy. Without this, you will burn out in mid-career and wonder where your life went.”

— Jonathan Sacks

15. “To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.”

— Jonathan Sacks

16. “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.”

— Jonathan Sacks

17. “We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.”

— Jonathan Sacks

18. “A perfect storm is in the making: financial uncertainty, economic downturn, government cuts, rising unemployment and a future that looks less clear the more we try to fathom it.”

— Jonathan Sacks

19. “Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.”

— Jonathan Sacks

20. “The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.”

— Jonathan Sacks

21. “In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel...”

— Jonathan Sacks

22. “The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation.”

— Jonathan Sacks

23. “The wisest rule in investment is: when others are selling, buy. When others are buying, sell. Usually, of course, we do the opposite. When everyone else is buying, we assume they know something we don’t, so we buy. Then people start selling, panic sets in, and we sell too.”

— Jonathan Sacks

24. “Close to a billion people – one-eighth of the world’s population – still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.”

— Jonathan Sacks

25. “In our interconnected world, we must learn to feel enlarged, not threatened, by difference – that is what I have argued.”

— Jonathan Sacks

26. “The world we build tomorrow is born in the stories we tell our children today. Politics moves the pieces. Education changes the game.”

— Jonathan Sacks

27. “When money rules, we remember the price of things and forget the value of things, and that is dangerous.”

— Jonathan Sacks

28. “Hope, even more than necessity, is the mother of invention.”

— Jonathan Sacks

29. “Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.”

— Jonathan Sacks

30. “God does not want us to understand the suffering of the innocent but to fight for a world in which the innocent no longer suffer.”

— Jonathan Sacks

31. “Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.”

— Jonathan Sacks

32. “When we love and make loving commitments, we create families and communities within which people can grow and take risks, knowing that hands will be there to catch them should they fall.”

— Jonathan Sacks

33. “We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.”

— Jonathan Sacks

34. “In an ecology of love, people can relate in trust and face the future without fear. They do not need to play it safe. They can take uncertainty in their stride.”

— Jonathan Sacks

35. “Giving is what makes a nation great.”

— Jonathan Sacks

36. “What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.”

— Jonathan Sacks

37. “Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy.”

— Jonathan Sacks

38. “The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.”

— Jonathan Sacks

39. “Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.”

— Jonathan Sacks

40. “Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the sick and elderly, or even protection against violence and abuse.”

— Jonathan Sacks

41. “When everything is available, every lifestyle on offer, when all you have is freedom, but nothing to guide you in that freedom, “it’s not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life, you have trouble even staying focused on the question.”

— Jonathan Sacks

42. “Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.”

— Jonathan Sacks

43. “Cyberspace can’t compensate for real space. We benefit from chatting to people face to face.”

— Jonathan Sacks

44. “Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.”

— Jonathan Sacks

45. “The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.”

— Jonathan Sacks

46. “The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.”

— Jonathan Sacks

47. “We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.”

— Jonathan Sacks

48. “God’s forgiveness allows us to be honest with ourselves. We recognize our imperfections, admit our failures, and plead to God for clemency.”

— Jonathan Sacks

49. “The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.”

— Jonathan Sacks

50. “If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.”

— Jonathan Sacks