Orthodoxy Quotes - Page 8

• Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence.

  Bertrand Russell

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• At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

  George Orwell

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (2001). “Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.

  Blaise Pascal

  Sides, May, Opinion

  Blaise Pascal (1731). “Thoughts on Religion, and Other Curious Subjects: Written Originally in French”, p.183

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• I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.

  Harriet Martineau

  Atheism, Superstitions, Next

  Harriet Martineau (2006). “Autobiography”, p.568, Broadview Press

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• In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left

  Peter Kreeft

  Age, Rebellion, Left

  Peter Kreeft (1992). “Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion”, p.189, Ignatius Press

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• When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless ‘freedom of worship’ for ‘freedom of religion’.

  Eric Metaxas

  Lying, Government, Cynical

  "Raising Good Men". Interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, www.nationalreview.com. May 4, 2013.

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• Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.

  John D. Caputo

  Mean, Self, Water

  John D. Caputo (2007). “What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church”, p.131, Baker Academic

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• At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.

  George Orwell

  Agreement, Facts, Moments

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• Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Average, Want, Take Me

  "Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction". Interview with Michael Cunningham, electricliterature.com. April 1, 2016.

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• Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

  Chinua Achebe

  Creativity, Fire, Sparks

  Chinua Achebe (1988). “Anthills of the Savannah”, p.100, Heinemann

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• [I]t's up to Republicans to expose the bureaucracies and criticize the orthodoxies - to ask why visas for travel to the United States are still being issued in West Africa and why American military forces are being deployed there without a workable plan or intelligible purpose, why CDC spending priorities are so skewed and CDC management so weak, and why here at home routine police powers aren't being used and routine public health measures aren't being implemented.

  William Kristol

  Military, Home, Priorities

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• Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.

  Jesse Ventura

  Religious, Ethnicity, Ideas

  Jesse Ventura (2008). “Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!: From the Minnesota Governor's Mansion to the Baja Outback : Reflections and Revisionings”, Skyhorse Publishing Company Incorporated

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• I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

  Barack Obama

  Political, Dumb, Challenges

  Barack Obama (2006). “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”, p.31, Crown

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• Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Men, Discovery, Innovation

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• The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Religious, Attitude, Believe

  "Nihilism On A Religious Soil". Short story by Nikolai Berdyaev, May 6, 1907.

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• The friends of evangelical doctrine, and the advocates of orthodoxy, have the following objects to keep ever in view in this age; they must take care of their Bibles, that they be not mutilated or curtailed by lawless criticism; they must take care of their theology, that it be not perverted by false philosophy; and they must take care of their pulpits, that they be not occupied by heretical, unspiritual, or incompetent ministers.

  John Angell James

  Philosophy, Views, Age

  John Angell James (1848). “An Earnest Ministry the Want of the Times”, p.16

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• The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

  Edith Hamilton

  Generations, Next

  Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub

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• The war between the artist and writer and government or orthodoxy is one of the tragedies of humankind. One chief enemy is stupidity and failure to understand anything about the creative mind. For a bureaucratic politician to presume to tell any artist or writer how to get his mind functioning is the ultimate in asininity.

  Helen Foster Snow

  War, Artist, Government

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• Freedom to think requires not only freedom of expression but also freedom from the threat of orthodoxy and being outcast and ostracized.

  Helen Foster Snow

  Freedom, Thinking, Expression

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• What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Expression, Imagination

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “In good faith”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Anti-clericalism and non-belief, have their bigots just as orthodoxy does.

  Julien Green

  Doe, Belief, Bigots

  "Journal" by Julien Green, July 23, 1945.

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• The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.

  Ed Crane

  Religious, Class, People

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• Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.

  John Wesley

  Religion, May, Opinion

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• Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Lakes, Government, American West

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.

  Thomas Huxley

  Christian, Atheist, School

  Letter to Charles Kingsley, mathcs.clarku.edu. May 05, 1863.

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