Opiate Of The People Quotes

Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his reason doomed him, he was like an insomniac driven to awaken sleepers from dreams illegitimately won by going around shouting, 'Don't you realize it was a placebo!' Thus it seemed to me that what you were up against in Stein was not logic rampant, but frustrated faith. He could not forgive God for not existing. ~ Peter De Vries

Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We open ourselves into something more complete and beautiful. This bigger vista is perhaps the most magnificent aspect of a religious experience.
There is a sense in which Karl Marx was correct when he said that religion is the opiate of the people. However, he was wrong to scoff at this. Religion can give us skills for climbing up on onto a ledge above our suffering and looking down at it with a kind and open mind. This helps us calm down and connect to all of the world's sufferers. Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred, and it is the sacred that saves us. ~ Mary Pipher

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries. ~ Phillip Adams

Up there, comrades," he would say solemnly, pointing to the sky with his large beak– "up there, just on the other side of that dark cloud that you can see– there it lies, Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest for ever from our labours!" He even claimed to have been there on one of his higher flights, and to have seen the everlasting fields of clover and the linseed cake and lump sugar growing on the hedges. Many of the animals believed him. Their lives now, they reasoned, were hungry and laborious; was it not right and just that a better world should exist somewhere else? ~ George Orwell

Those who reject Christianity will not be moved by Christ's statement that poverty is blessed. But here a rather remarkable fact comes to my aid. Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere 'opiate of the people' have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from 'liquidation', and place in them the only hope for the human race. But this is not compatible with a belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil; it even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed. ~ C.S. Lewis

And the story is told that a young woman taking an examination for a Communist party post was unsure of the answer to a question asking the inscription on a certain monument. She wrote the words of Marx quoted above and when the examination was over hurried to the monument to check. Reading the inscription "Religion is the opiate of the people," she fell to her knees, saying, "Thank God. ~ Roberson

… the kingdom of God is so close and nearby that we might have overstepped it in our amusement in the playgrounds of promise. ~ Vitor Westhelle

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. ~ Zadie Smith

In his early text, somewhat cumbersomely titled 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' the young Karl Marx famously noted that religion - the Christian faith, he meant primarily - is 'the opiate of the people.' It's a drug, and it's a 'downer' or 'depressant' insulating people from the pain of oppressive social realities and consoling them with a dream world of heavenly bliss. Alternatively, religion can function as an 'upper,' a 'stimulant' energizing people for the tasks at hand - a function of religion Marx failed to grasp. ~ Miroslav Volf

Communism is the opiate of the people. ~ Will Durant

America?" said Gamesh, smiling. "Roland, what's American to you? Or me, or those tens of thousands up in the the stands? It's just a word they use to keep your nose to the grindstone and your toes to the line. America is the opiate of the people. ~ Philip Roth

Religion is the opiate of the people! ~ Philip Roth

Television in its present form ... [is] the opiate of the people of the United States. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Ephesians 2:1-10 At one time you were like a dead person because of the things you did wrong and your offenses against God. 2You used to act like most people in our world do. You followed the rule of a destructive spiritual power. This is the spirit of disobedience to God's will that is now at work in persons whose lives are characterized by disobedience. 3At one time you were like those persons. All of you used to do whatever felt good and whatever you thought you wanted so that you were children headed for punishment just like everyone else. 4- 5However, God is rich in mercy. He brought us to life with Christ while we were dead as a result of those things that we did wrong. He did this because of the great love that he has for us. You are saved by God's grace! ~ David L. Bone

It is not common for people to think of their own lives as creations. You are not encouraged to have with your own life the kind of relationship a creator has with his or her vision. But your life can be a creation. ~ Robert Fritz

As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human maturity. No true adult wants to be a consumer, worker bee, or tycoon, or a soldier in an imperial war, and none would go through these motions if there were other options at hand. The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies - and vice versa. ~ Bill Plotkin

In times past, knowledge of the bowel was more widespread and people were taught how to care for the bowel. Somehow bowel wisdom got lost and it became something that no one wanted to talk about anymore. ~ Bernard Jensen

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I think the body image thing, everybody can identify with that. In our culture there's just so much pressure and so much attention placed on the way we look. You just turn on the TV or flip open a magazine and there's people who don't look like any of us. I think this movie is like, finally, a celebration of reality and of our imperfections. We're not all a size 2 and we're not all a size 0, and you know what? That's OK, because some of us like to eat! ~ America Ferrera

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing. ~ Miguel Nicolelis

Well, there are lot of people who make a lot of money off the fifth- and sixth-life crises. All of a sudden they have a ton of consumers scared out of their minds and willing to buy facial cream, designer jeans, SAT test prep courses, condoms, cars, scooters, self-help books, watches, wallets, stocks, whatever ... all the crap that the twenty-somethings used to buy, they now have the ten-somethings buying. They doubled their market! ~ Ned Vizzini

I'm the Ali of today. I'm the Marvin Gaye of today. I'm the Bob Marley of today. I'm the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. And a lot of people are starting to realise that now. ~ R. Kelly

That's when he'd run and run until he was nothing more than two feet and a pair of lungs, until he coughed blood and stank of sweat and forgot for an hour or two everything that he was and what he had to do and the people who'd get hurt along the way. ~ Carmen Amato

If people are constantly falling off a cliff, you could place ambulances under the cliff or build a fence on the top of the cliff. We are placing all too many ambulances under the cliff. ~ Denis Parsons Burkitt

The two highest levels of influence are achieved when 1) people follow you because of what you've done for them, and 2) people follow you because of who you are. In other words, the highest levels of influence are reached when generosity and trustworthiness surround your behavior. ~ Dale Carnegie

What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it's not arousal that's so finitely circumscribed? What if in fact there were only like two really distinct individual people walking back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type one, always rather two, one upside down in a convex lens. ~ David Foster Wallace

Some people can find all the peace of mind they need in a good, satisfying conflict. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

I think it's always hard to find great roles, no matter what age you are. So I always say to people, 'You have to remember that Hollywood is in the business of making movies that they can sell tickets to; they're not in the business of finding great roles for actors.' ~ Julianne Moore

We now have capabilities in science and technology that raise the very realistic possibility that a small group of terrorists could kill not only thousands of people, as they did on September 11th, but hundreds of thousands of people. And that has changed the dimension of the threat we face. ~ Michael Chertoff

One of the best ways to influence people is to make them feel important. ~ Roy T. Bennett

Dear Son,
People with narrow visions who are afraid of the future are unnecessary weights in your life
Love Daddy ~ Sameh Elsayed

I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right ... People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry (one word: dotcom) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra (remember "horizontal careers"?). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are
and connecting that to work that they truly love (and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). ~ Po Bronson

You have this disturbing reality that there are a lot of people who would rather say, 'I'm on strike' than 'I'm unemployed.' And those are the people who vote for strikes. ~ Dick Wolf

We [on the left] have to be used to being a minority
a small minority
for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right, even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror-image delusions. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies. Psalms 5:8 Very bitter is the enmity of the world against the people of Christ. Men will forgive a thousand faults in others, but they will magnify the most trivial offence in the followers of Jesus. Instead of vainly regretting this, let us turn it to account, and since so many are watching for our halting, let this be a special motive for walking very carefully before God. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill: from the Nile to the Euphrates. ~ David Ben-Gurion

I do think people are definitely sick of the Kardashians. ~ Natasha Leggero

People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology - laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet - as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. ~ Ken Robinson

People lift their hand to rebel against the Most High only to find that their rebellion is unwitting service in the wonderful designs of God. ~ John Piper

People don't teach you how to handle the workload that comes from a little bit of success, and it's something I'd never had to handle, because I'd been rejected for so long. ~ Felicia Day

IF YOU CREATE a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow), people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying uncharted pathways and then charging down them. They will also begin to see the upside of decisiveness: The time they've saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they're on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot. ~ Ed Catmull

Do we know what practices would be effective in resisting aliens? Wouldn't the public have to be convinced, in all countries, that there is such a threat? When have the major nations on this planet shown they can agree on any military course of action? Earthlings are already spending a trillion dollars a year on things military. Where would the money come from? Krugman seems to be suggesting more lies are what is needed. How about everybody cutting their military budgets in half and feeding people instead? ~ Stanton T. Friedman

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it. ~ David Bowie

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion. ~ Charles Dickens

Our [generation] people have the worst diet of anybody. I'm ready to put a farmer on my payroll. We've got to get back to growing our own food. You are what you eat! ~ Prince

But Julian's blood was different. When she saw it she thought of him, shot and crumpling, the way his blood had run like water through her fingers. It was the first time in years that she'd actually thought he might die, that she might lose him. She knew what people said about parabatai, knew that it was meant to be a loss as profound as that of a spouse or a sibling. Emma had lost her parents; she had thought she knew what loss was, was prepared for it. But nothing had prepared her for the feeling that the idea of losing Jules wrenched out of her: that sky would go dark forever, that there would never be solid ground again. ~ Cassandra Clare

A misunderstanding of the Laws of the Universe is at the heart of this conversation as the people of your society wage wars against the things they do not want: war against terror, war against AIDS, war against teenage pregnancy, war against violence, war against cancer - and every one of those things is getting bigger because attention to unwanted creates more unwanted. ~ Esther Hicks

Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back. ~ John Green

Behold Akar Kessell, the Tyrant of Icewind Dale!" he cried. "People of Ten-Towns, your master has come!" "Your words are a bit premature - " Cassius began, but Kessell cut him short with a frenzied scream. "Never interrupt me!" the wizard shouted, ~ R.A. Salvatore

Home is home wherever you grow up generally speaking. Unless you're one of those people who always wants to get out of a small town and do something bigger with your life, which I always did but I always wanted to come back, so home is home and its a great place for me to come back and escape the hustle and bustle of the life that I live. ~ Seth Rollins

What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself. ~ Kadir Nelson

You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don't like old women. We don't honor age in our society, and we certainly don't honor it in Hollywood. ~ Tyne Daly

It was her plan to outrun all of that, and somewhere in that running she had started to fly. She no longer felt like touching all the dirt and the muck she had so patiently submitted herself to so that people would think she was a very nice girl. She was not such a very nice girl. Nobody who was very, very nice would ever work this hard to take something they wanted only for themselves. ~ Ann Patchett