Jewish Communities/defining Character and Principles of Faith

Famous quotes containing the words jewish, communities, defining, character, principles and/or faith:

    “I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction—the Messiah.”
    —Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)

    “The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.”
    —Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)

    “The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”
    —David Blankenhorn (20th century)

    “[A]s a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.”
    —James Boswell (1740–1795)

    “That, upon the whole, we may conclude that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”
    —David Hume (1711–1776)

    “Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)