Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

 

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
--
2000 Years of Disbelief : Famous People with the Courage to Doubt (1996) by James A. Haught

 

Peter Ustinov

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There is a need for what [Michael] Polanyi calls the critique of doubt. When we undertake to doubt any statement, we do so on the basis of beliefs which--in the act of doubting--we do not doubt. I can only doubt the truth of a statement on the ground of other things--usually a great many things--which I believe to be true. It is impossible at the same time to doubt both the statement, and the beliefs on the basis of which the statement is doubted.

 

Lesslie Newbigin

 

Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers.

 

Orson Scott Card

 

Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.

 

Mario Vargas Llosa

 

I very firmly believe that what unites America today is infinitely more important than those things which divide us. We are united Americans—North, East, West, and South, both parties—in our desire for peace, peace with honor, the kind of a peace that will last, and we are moving swiftly toward that great goal, not just in Vietnam, but a new era of peace in which the old relationships between the two super powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and between the world's most populous nation, the People's Republic of China, and the United States, are changed so that we are on the eve of what could be the greatest generation of peace, true peace for the whole world, that man has ever known.

 

Richard Nixon

 

People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else.

 

Orson Scott Card