It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.

- Robert Neelly Bellah

Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontoge…

- Robert Neelly Bellah

That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached …

- Robert Neelly Bellah

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 n…

- Robert Neelly Bellah

The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.

- Robert Neelly Bellah

Our culture is at a critical cusp - a time that requires that we define what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. Within our nation we need to fo…

- Robert Neelly Bellah

...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.

- Robert Neelly Bellah

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 it's s…

- Robert Neelly Bellah

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