That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set. — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition. — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves. — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share
It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary. — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is.… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we're politically correct on everything, but… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent,… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we… — Robert Neelly Bellah Copy Share Image
![“We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is…” quote by Robert Neelly Bellah](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/5d8/robert-neelly-bellah-25104_adaptation_we-re-humans-running-great-risks-of-doin_1819566.jpg)