Jews survived all the defeats expulsions persecutions and pogroms the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people even the Holocaust itself because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

It's possible that the 2012 general-election race will be the least overtly religious one since 1972 the last campaign before Roe v. Wade and the rise of Jimmy Carter brought evangelicalism into the political mainstream. That's because faith remains a complicated issue for Obama who is still wrongly thought to be a Muslim in some quarters.

You can almost see voters nodding their heads at home: The public's faith in politicians and political institutions has been on a steep and dangerous decline for decades because elected leaders fail to deliver.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

When Christians start thinking about Jesus things start breaking down they lose their faith. It's perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they'll lose their Christ the very linchpin of their religion.

What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it or rational argument that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.

A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump faith in its future progress and desire to serve the great cause of this progress should be called not a humanist but a humanitarian and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.

I looked at some of the statues of Jesus they were just stones with no life. When they said that God is three I was puzzled even more but could not argue. I believed it simply because I had to have respect for the faith of my parents.

I don't think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm say the Big Bang theory that doesn't at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.

It's very important that every movie I do makes money because I want the people that had the faith in me to get their money back.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

Question: Why are we Masters of our Fate the captains of our souls? Because we have the power to control our thoughts our attitudes. That is why many people live in the withering negative world. That is why many people live in the Positive Faith world.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax and float.

Faith is the great cop-out the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of even perhaps because of the lack of evidence.

Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.

My family frankly they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

Don't take too much comfort in the fact that you're successful today because tomorrow could bring failure. There's no surety in life.

I knew that there were several among African-American leaders who had been put out by me because of my failure or reluctance to endorse Sen. Kerry.

Y'know the real reason why I was such a failure in the sense of being unable to make any sort of a living was because I was really not motivated. I had no motivation.

When I got Jacob's Latter I was nervous because I felt I wasn't allowed to fail. I felt that they were waiting for one little failure and that would prove them right and I'd be 'out of there.'

We decided to try in vitro because both Peter and I felt we couldn't handle another failure. When I miscarried after that we had to come to terms with the possibility that this wasn't meant to be.

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful it's tough it's buried in our mythic childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.