It's the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen. -- Muhammad Ali

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in." -- Isaac Asimov

 

* Since the beginning, Native Peoples lived a life of being in harmony with all that surrounds us. It is a belief that all humankind are related to each other. Each has a purpose, spirit and sacredness. It is an understanding with the Great Spirit or Creator that we will follow these ways. And in this understanding we believe we are related to all other living species... -- Dennis Banks

 

We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged. ~ Bill Clinton

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. -- John Dewey

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking. -- R. Buckminster Fuller

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

"I just have this absolute belief that humans are moving away from cruelty and destruction towards a time when we can truly live in harmony with nature. When we understand that there is a spiritual power around us from which we can draw strength. That is where I believe human destiny ultimately is taking us. I just hope we have time." ~ Jane Goodall

 

"I never had come up with a really profound and strong gesture -- nothing like Julia Butterfly's. So I figured the best thing I could do was live by my beliefs. That's probably the most profound thing that anybody can do." -- Daryl Hannah And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense. -- Daryl Hannah

Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs. -- Barbara Marx Hubbard

 

It is my firm belief that I have a link with the past and a responsibility to the future. I cannot give up. I cannot despair. There's a whole future, generations to come. I have to keep trying. -- King Hussein of Jordan

* How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance -- the one value that is indispensable in creating community. -- Barbara Jordan We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done. -- Barbara Jordan

* "Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others." -- John F. Kennedy

* It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. -- Robert F. Kennedy

...Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward. Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world. And let us be joyful in the homecoming... -- George McGovern

Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. -- Barack Obama

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. -- Thomas Paine.

I do not believe in a simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil. I believe this is a big world full of men, women, and children who struggle to eat, to love, to work, to protect their families, their beliefs, and their dreams. -- Sean Penn

* “The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live..." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

* "We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself. -- Bertrand Russell Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. -- Bertrand Russell

What a man believes may be ascertained not from his creed, but from assumptions on which he habitually acts. -- George Bernard Shaw

Beyond beliefs is a shared vision of a better world. -- Robert Alan Silverstein Beyond beliefs is a vision shared... -- Robert Alan Silverstein

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism, are all too frequently those who . . . ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism—the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought. -- Margaret Chase Smith

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion, or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family. -- Gloria Steinem

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. -- Mark Twain In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. -- Mark Twain

If we are to have the public conversations essential to taking on serious dilemmas from climate change to criminal justice reform, we need forums for those conversations. The media can facilitate the conversations or shut them down. They can open up or constrain our beliefs about what is possible, what is desirable, who is deserving, and which perspectives are legitimate. -- Sarah van Gelder

* We believe in taking down the barriers, but we also believe in the most energetic reconciliation among peoples by getting them to know each other, talk each other's languages, understand each other's fears and beliefs, getting to know each other physically, philosophically, and spiritually. It is much harder to kill your near neighbor than the thousands of unknown and hostile aliens at the other end of a nuclear missile. We have to create a world in which there are no unknown, hostile aliens at the other end of any missiles. -- Betty Williams (The Peace People)

I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community. ~ Terry Tempest Williams * Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change. ~ Terry Tempest Williams We have to speak out now on behalf of our community and on behalf of the land and say they're the same thing and say "No, we are not rolling over" and "No, this is not a corporate enterprise." This is democracy in the fullest sense and we must have regard and reverence and those are the cornerstones of a just society. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen. -- Frank Lloyd Wright