Top 50 Susan Jacoby Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.”

— Susan Jacoby

2. “The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.”

— Susan Jacoby

3. “Americans are in serious intellectual trouble – in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.”

— Susan Jacoby

4. “This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.”

— Susan Jacoby

5. “If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.”

— Susan Jacoby

6. “The Roman Empire was fairly tolerant of religious choice as long as you made a point not of thumbing your nose in public at the Roman gods.”

— Susan Jacoby

7. “A person can be religious and still respect secular values and not talk about Jesus all the time as though every American believed in Jesus.”

— Susan Jacoby

8. “At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.”

— Susan Jacoby

9. “Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.”

— Susan Jacoby

10. “I no more believe in the God of the Jews than I believe in any God.”

— Susan Jacoby

11. “If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.”

— Susan Jacoby

12. “High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.”

— Susan Jacoby

13. “I have always regarded the development of the individual as the only legitimate goal of education.”

— Susan Jacoby

14. “We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.”

— Susan Jacoby

15. “The revolutionary idea that children have rights was born in the Enlightenment, but the practical application of that concept, in schools and within families, was very much a product of the progressive side of the Victorian era.”

— Susan Jacoby

16. “The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between.”

— Susan Jacoby

17. “Whether you are religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer no more.”

— Susan Jacoby

18. “Atheism is not a religion. One of the things, in fact, that atheism lacks are the kinds of rituals that religion does provide and I would be the first to say that.”

— Susan Jacoby

19. “My atheism doesn’t define my day-to-day life at all. But I realize – and maybe it is because, unlike people who sort of stay comfortably in a religion, I had to do a lot of thinking and reading before I realized that I was an atheist.”

— Susan Jacoby

20. “I completely can’t understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it’s right.”

— Susan Jacoby

21. “If you believe in what I do, which is secular humanism, I would find it extremely difficult to live with someone – not to love someone – but to live with somebody and build a life of someone who disagreed with me on something so fundamental.”

— Susan Jacoby

22. “Once the Roman Catholic Church in the West became the church most closely connected with the state, the Roman Catholic Church did not recognize the validity of any religion other than its own.”

— Susan Jacoby

23. “Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter writes. “Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: ‘Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!’”5.”

— Susan Jacoby

24. “I think people who love each other and live together and have children together need to agree on the things that are most important in life.”

— Susan Jacoby

25. “It’s something fundamental to me, human rights that people are equal under law simply because they are human beings. And I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed, for instance, as Orthodox Jews do, that women are unclean during their menstrual periods.”

— Susan Jacoby

26. “The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization.”

— Susan Jacoby

27. “I can’t imagine falling in love with a devoutly religious person.”

— Susan Jacoby

28. “The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence.”

— Susan Jacoby

29. “I’d be the last person in the world to deny that there are many people for whom faith is – can be a great sustaining force. Y.”

— Susan Jacoby

30. “I still do find the prayers of the Kaddish quite moving, and I just substitute in my mind nature, although that’s what the founders did in a lot of their documents, too. They substituted nature or providence for God. I think that’s what I do in my head with Jewish God.”

— Susan Jacoby

31. “While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.”

— Susan Jacoby

32. “I can no more imagine falling in love with someone who believed that than I can imagine falling in love with someone who believes that blacks shouldn’t be able to vote and are inferior to whites.”

— Susan Jacoby

33. “I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.”

— Susan Jacoby

34. “I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.”

— Susan Jacoby

35. “People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn’t go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.”

— Susan Jacoby

36. “One of the reasons there are largely Catholic and largely Protestant regions of Germany today is that people did sort themselves out geographically.”

— Susan Jacoby

37. “For one thing, the Catholic Church in particular has this one thing – confession – in which you could go, confess to a priest and obtain absolution of your sins. And there was a routine and a ritual and I think – I think that it did help.”

— Susan Jacoby

38. “If you chose a particular religion, you were siding with the government religion of whatever region you were in. That’s never been true in America, but also, the United States also has so many more immigrant groups which also tends to imply more religious diversity right away.”

— Susan Jacoby

39. “I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will.”

— Susan Jacoby

40. “It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.”

— Susan Jacoby

41. “That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.”

— Susan Jacoby

42. “What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly “designed” the order of nature.”

— Susan Jacoby

43. “I don’t ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can’t imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things.”

— Susan Jacoby

44. “I don’t see why any president has to talk about his belief in God.”

— Susan Jacoby

45. “One of the interesting things is is that Judaism was very attractive to the Roman aristocracy.”

— Susan Jacoby

46. “I’m not saying that I think atheists are better than other people. God, no. What I am saying is I do feel that this an integral part of who I am. And it’s not something that I could comfortably think of not sharing with the person I loved most in the world.”

— Susan Jacoby

47. “We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation, and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with our conclusions. Philosophy has not the egotism of faith.”

— Susan Jacoby

48. “I have received many touching letters and emails from people who live in the most religious parts of the country, in places like rural Texas, saying it is so good to see someone be able to say I am an atheist without shame.”

— Susan Jacoby

49. “I believe that whether one believes in God or not is – it’s very central to who I am.”

— Susan Jacoby

50. “I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here.”

— Susan Jacoby