Top 140 Jonathan Sacks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.”

— Jonathan Sacks

53. “Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.”

— Jonathan Sacks

54. “Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression.”

— Jonathan Sacks

55. “Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.”

— Jonathan Sacks

56. “Volunteering has been undervalued in Britain for a long time. Often it has been seen as a kind of cut-price, amateur version of work that would be better done by the state. When politicians speak about it, people hear in the background the sound of budgets being cut.”

— Jonathan Sacks

57. “Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.”

— Jonathan Sacks

58. “Through constant creation of dissatisfaction, the consumer society is in fact a highly sophisticated mechanism for the production and distribution of unhappiness. That.”

— Jonathan Sacks

59. “The first of the request prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole.”

— Jonathan Sacks

60. “While we can remember the past, we cannot write the future. Only our children, the future of our community, can do that.”

— Jonathan Sacks

61. “Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.”

— Jonathan Sacks

62. “The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety.”

— Jonathan Sacks

63. “Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.”

— Jonathan Sacks

64. “Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.”

— Jonathan Sacks

65. “Broadcasting is being replaced by narrowcasting. The difference is that broadcasting speaks to a mixed public, exposing them to a range of views. Narrowcasting speaks to a targeted public and exposes them only to facts and opinions that support their prejudices. It fragments a public into a set of sects of the like-minded.”

— Jonathan Sacks

66. “A primordial instinct going back to humanity’s tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market – the least overtly spiritual of concepts – that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain.”

— Jonathan Sacks

67. “It is easy to be a critic, but the only effective critics are those who truly love – and show they love – those whom they criticise.”

— Jonathan Sacks

68. “If we cannot create peace or justice or compassion within the family we will be unable to do so within the nation or the world. Not until Joseph forgives his brothers and is reconciled with them can the story move on to the larger canvas of history.”

— Jonathan Sacks

69. “After the destructionofthe Second Temple Jewslived by an ancient and fundamental insight, that God does not live in buildings but in the human heart.”

— Jonathan Sacks

70. “So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.”

— Jonathan Sacks

71. “We have lots of heroes today – sportsmen, supermodels, media personalities. They come, they have their 15 minutes of fame, and they go. But the influence of good teachers stays with us. They are the people who really shape our lives.”

— Jonathan Sacks

72. “Until our global institutions take a stand against the teaching and preaching of hate, all their efforts of diplomacy and military intervention will fail. Ultimately the responsibility is ours. Tomorrow’s world is born in what we teach our children today.”

— Jonathan Sacks

73. “Jews have deep respect for the Queen and the royal family. We say a prayer for them every Sabbath in synagogue. We recite a special blessing on seeing the Queen.”

— Jonathan Sacks

74. “Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases they see themselves as ‘doing God’s work’. They ‘seem happy’. That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell.”

— Jonathan Sacks

75. “Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, ‘What happened?’ but rather, ‘How then shall I live?’ And it’s only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.”

— Jonathan Sacks

76. “Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin.”

— Jonathan Sacks

77. “Man was not made for the service of economies; economies were made to serve mankind; and men and women were made – so we believe – to serve one another, not just ourselves.”

— Jonathan Sacks

78. “Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.”

— Jonathan Sacks

79. “With wealth comes responsibility.”

— Jonathan Sacks

80. “The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.”

— Jonathan Sacks

81. “In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.”

— Jonathan Sacks

82. “Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organizations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighborhood and civic groups and professional associations.”

— Jonathan Sacks

83. “Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.”

— Jonathan Sacks

84. “If we want God to listen to us, we have to be prepared to listen to Him. And if we learn to listen to Him, then we eventually learn to listen to our fellow humans: the silent cry of the lonely, the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, the people in existential pain.”

— Jonathan Sacks

85. “I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.”

— Jonathan Sacks

86. “Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.”

— Jonathan Sacks

87. “Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds.”

— Jonathan Sacks

88. “Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects.”

— Jonathan Sacks

89. “In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives.”

— Jonathan Sacks

90. “Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.”

— Jonathan Sacks

91. “When you stop believing in God, there is no sudden explosion of light or darkness. The world continues on its accustomed course. The sky does not fall. The sun still shines. Life goes on. But something is lost nonetheless, something important that gives life connectedness, depth and a sense of purpose; that gives you a feeling of participating in something vast and consequential.”

— Jonathan Sacks

92. “In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.”

— Jonathan Sacks

93. “Weapons win wars, but it takes ideas to win the peace.”

— Jonathan Sacks

94. “We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.”

— Jonathan Sacks

95. “While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it’s hard. Invest in the spirit.”

— Jonathan Sacks

96. “The universe is more than mere matter in motion. It and we were brought into being by a Creator who seeks our good.”

— Jonathan Sacks

97. “A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.”

— Jonathan Sacks

98. “The market economy is deeply congruent with the values set out in the Hebrew Bible. Material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task. Work is a noble calling.”

— Jonathan Sacks

99. “If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.”

— Jonathan Sacks

100. “Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.”

— Jonathan Sacks