Top 140 Jonathan Sacks Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The evidence shows that religious people – defined by regular attendance at a place of worship – actually do make better neighbors.”

— Jonathan Sacks

102. “People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism – even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn’t always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media.”

— Jonathan Sacks

103. “Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon.”

— Jonathan Sacks

104. “Yahoo has gone too far in wrongfully accusing us of a conspiracy that doesn’t exist. If they are having problems retaining engineers, they should be looking at the internal sources of employee dissatisfaction rather than trying to cover that up with this legal action.”

— Jonathan Sacks

105. “Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

— Jonathan Sacks

106. “Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom.”

— Jonathan Sacks

107. “If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.”

— Jonathan Sacks

108. “We have no idea where the world is going, except that it’s going there very fast.”

— Jonathan Sacks

109. “The crucial differentiation between humans and all other animals is that we make meanings, and the name we give to collective systems of meanings is culture.”

— Jonathan Sacks

110. “Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights.”

— Jonathan Sacks

111. “Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.”

— Jonathan Sacks

112. “A Martian would think that the English worship at supermarkets, not in churches.”

— Jonathan Sacks

113. “If we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. To put it more precisely, we need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.”

— Jonathan Sacks

114. “The royals – all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles – have done outstanding work with the faith communities.”

— Jonathan Sacks

115. “As the political leaders of Europe meet to save the euro and European Union, so should religious leaders.”

— Jonathan Sacks

116. “Parents and leaders must establish a culture in which honest, open, respectful communication takes place, one that involves not just speaking but also listening. Without it, tragedy is waiting in the wings.”

— Jonathan Sacks

117. “In her religious role, the Queen is head of the Church of England, but in her civic role she cares for all her subjects, and no one is better at making everyone she meets feel valued.”

— Jonathan Sacks

118. “Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world’s first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.”

— Jonathan Sacks

119. “It is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.”

— Jonathan Sacks

120. “God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn’t get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.”

— Jonathan Sacks

121. “The seventeenth century was the dawn of an age of secularisation. The twenty-first century will be the start of an age of desecularisation.”

— Jonathan Sacks

122. “The twenty-first century is, and will remain, the Age of Insecurity.”

— Jonathan Sacks

123. “That this occurred at the launch of the report into the Labour Party’s recent troubles with antisemitism shows how deep the sickness is in parts of left of British politics today.”

— Jonathan Sacks

124. “Which European leader today would not relish the wonder-working powers of a Moses? Budget deficit? Unpopular cuts? How about just a little miracle, an overnight increase in gold reserves, a new oil field, or the next world-changing communications technology? Surely that’s not too much to ask.”

— Jonathan Sacks

125. “Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.”

— Jonathan Sacks

126. “ISIS is a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity. In the current political climate, when hate crimes are rising and political rhetoric is increasingly divisive, this is all the more shocking.”

— Jonathan Sacks

127. “One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different prohibition.”

— Jonathan Sacks

128. “I think our people in Britain have a normative expectation of ethical conduct.”

— Jonathan Sacks

129. “Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: ‘Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.’6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.”

— Jonathan Sacks

130. “A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. Leaders must have the strength to know what they cannot be if they are to have the courage to be themselves.”

— Jonathan Sacks

131. “Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.”

— Jonathan Sacks

132. “As Shakespeare said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’4.”

— Jonathan Sacks

133. “Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it’s more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.”

— Jonathan Sacks

134. “Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise.”

— Jonathan Sacks

135. “The build-up of personal and collective debt in America and Europe should have sent warning signals to anyone familiar with the biblical institutions of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, created specifically because of the danger of people being trapped by debt.”

— Jonathan Sacks

136. “A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand.”

— Jonathan Sacks

137. “I realised that health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to recover.”

— Jonathan Sacks

138. “I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.”

— Jonathan Sacks

139. “Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.”

— Jonathan Sacks

140. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They speak different languages and use different powers of the brain.”

— Jonathan Sacks

141. “What Jacob learned – and what we learn, hearing his story – is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved.”

— Jonathan Sacks

142. “As long as there is hunger, poverty and treatable disease in the world there is work for us to do. As long as nations fight, and men hate, and corruption stalks the corridors of power; as long as there is unemployment and homelessness, depression and despair, our task is not yet done, and we hear, if we listen carefully enough, the voice of God asking us, as he asked the first humans, ‘Where are you?’ Hassidim tell the story of the.”

— Jonathan Sacks