I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.

With plenty of practice, we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief, even for those we have never met and know little about.

For humans, gift giving is a universal ritual laden with evolutionary implications.

Faith and its attendant rituals sound like a good deal, the whole eternal salvation thing, but inevitably they lead to fear, oppression, the rack and flames.

I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion – the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I’m more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, much thought.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast – is choice.

You have to know your triggers for stress and then have rituals for combating them.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

That modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing — not themselves but — all their neighbours.

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.

People are losing jobs, people need to be entertained, and I want to make movies that parents and children can look forward to seeing, that can become a kind of family ritual.