Robert Neelly Bellah Quotes

“However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.”

“Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.”

“Just when we are in many ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that our ethical individualism, deriving, as I have argued, from the Protestant religious tradition in America, is linked to an economic individualism that, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money. What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies, including other Protestant societies, a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves are not going to make it all alone.”

“The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.”

“If coffee is for closers, gold is for prospectors.”

“The sales process should be as natural and fluid as a well choreographed dance.”

“If you're as good as you're going to be, life's as good as it's going to get.”

“Did Cap’n Vidious leave that? He is such a cuddlebunny.” “Yeah,” I said, “that’s exactly how I’d describe him.”

“Loretta started belting out a song: “Row, row, row your boat, sitting in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G !”

“Words cannot explain the bruise that festers into a river that runs deep filled with pain n sorrows which only the visible can cure”