A Quote by Gustav Heinemann

Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions.

Gustav Heinemann

Quote Topics

Authority Everywhere Face Justify Questions Themselves Tradition

Quote Author

Gustav Heinemann
German - Politician
July 23, 1899 - July 7, 1976

I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.

Talal Asad

It's a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.

Christopher Hitchens

As Elders we have great respect for all religions and traditions as important forces that bind people together. Faith and tradition provide much of the foundation of our laws and social codes. But where religion and tradition are used to justify discrimination and especially when they are used to justify cruel and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, infanticide and child marriage, then we believe that is unacceptable.

Mary Robinson

There are questions of real power and then there are questions of phony authority. You have to break through the phony authority to begin to fight the real questions of power.

Karen Nussbaum

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

Richard Dawkins

The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition.

Carl Jung

Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.

J. M. Roberts

As to those other things which we hold on the authority, not of Scripture, but of tradition, and which are observed throughout the whole world, it may be understood that they are held as approved and instituted either by the apostles themselves, or by plenary Councils, whose authority in the Church is most useful, e.g. the annual commemoration, by special solemnities, of the Lord's passion, resurrection, and ascension, and of the descent of the Holy Spirit from heaven, and whatever else is in like manner observed by the whole Church wherever it has been established.

Saint Augustine

The problem is that those of us who were born into Islam and who don't want to live according to scripture - we don't have what the Jews have, which is a rabbinical tradition that allows you to ask questions. We also don't have the church tradition that the Christians have.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority?

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop.

Maria Mitchell

Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.

Vita Sackville-West

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits

Ruth Benedict

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

Ruth Benedict

Does the end justify the means? Or should it be, Do the ends justify the mean; do the extremes justify moderation?