Jonathan Sacks
The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation.Collection: Violence
In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel.Collection: Mean
Civil society rests on moral relationships. They are covenantal rather than contractual. They are brought about not by governments but by us a husbands and wives, parents, friends and citizens, and by the knowledge of what we do and what we are makes a difference to those around us. (...) Renewing society's resources of moral energy is the program, urgent but achievable.Collection: Husband
ISIS is a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity. In the current political climate, when hate crimes are rising and political rhetoric is increasingly divisive, this is all the more shocking.Collection: Hate
Sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith. For me, it was reading about how the Catholic Church wrestled with itself in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII set Nostra Aetate - the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions - in motion. It changed the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Today, Jews and Catholics meet as friends. If you can do that, after the longest history of hatred the world has known, that empowers you as a Jew or a Muslim to wrestle with your faith.Collection: Reading
The first of the request prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole.Collection: Prayer
If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.Collection: Alternatives
Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds.Collection: Independent
Freedom... leads those who have more than they need to share with those who have lessCollection: Love
The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbours.Collection: Religious
Yahoo has gone too far in wrongfully accusing us of a conspiracy that doesn't exist. If they are having problems retaining engineers, they should be looking at the internal sources of employee dissatisfaction rather than trying to cover that up with this legal action.Collection: Trying
It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.Collection: Blessing
Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books.Collection: Religious
We have lots of heroes today - sportsmen, supermodels, media personalities. They come, they have their 15 minutes of fame, and they go. But the influence of good teachers stays with us. They are the people who really shape our lives.Collection: Teacher
Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.Collection: Play
Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even beginCollection: Heart
That this occurred at the launch of the report into the Labour Party's recent troubles with antisemitism shows how deep the sickness is in parts of left of British politics today.Collection: Party
Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.Collection: Art
The twenty-first century is, and will remain, the Age of Insecurity.Collection: Insecurity
Man was not made for the service of economies; economies were made to serve mankind; and men and women were made - so we believe - to serve one another, not just ourselves.Collection: Believe
Hope, even more than necessity, is the mother of invention.Collection: Mother
There are hard texts in each tradition which we must confront and ask ourselves, 'Can we reinterpret those texts to allow us to live peaceably, and respectfully, with people of other faiths?' That is a job only Jews can do for Judaism, only Christians can do for Christianity, and only Muslims can do for Islam. But sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith.Collection: Christian
A Martian would think that the English worship at supermarkets, not in churches.Collection: Thinking
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, "What happened?" but rather, "How then shall I live?" And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.Collection: Book
We know – it has been measured in many experiments – that children with strong impulse control grow to be better adjusted, more dependable, achieve higher grades in school and college and have more success in their careers than others. Success depends on the ability to delay gratification, which is precisely what a consumerist culture undermines. At every stage, the emphasis is on the instant gratification of instinct. In the words of the pop group Queen, “I want it all and I want it now.” A whole culture is being infantilised.Collection: Strong
When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.Collection: Running
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.Collection: Stories
After the destructionofthe Second Temple Jewslived by an ancient and fundamental insight, that God does not live in buildings but in the human heart.Collection: Heart
We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast.Collection: Ideas
When you've got Jews and Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus removing graffiti from buildings, or getting drug dealers off the street, that's side by side. When you do that, you take it from the very elevated level of interfaith dialogue to the street level of neighbors. You get them working side by side, and they become friends. Friendship sometimes counts for more than interfaith agreement or understanding. Friendship is deeply human.Collection: Christian
Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.Collection: Believe
Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.Collection: Spiritual