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"Religion either produces the very best people or the very worst."
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"Hobbes's analysis of the causes of violence, borne out by modern data on crime and war, shows that violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a "pathology" except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms."

"She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word."

"A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity-or none at all-with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors."

"Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy."

"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

"Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree."

"No man in his senses will dance."

"No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure."
Explore more quotes by Richard Rohr

"The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved."

"Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries."

"You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life."

"I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic."

"When you get your, 'Who am I?', question right, all of your, 'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves"

"The people who know God well - mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator."

"I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona."

"True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude."

"The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history."
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