471 quotes found
"When I got back from the war in 1946 people didn't want the Mr. Smith kind of movie any more, and I refused to make war pictures."
"I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, "Aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?" Tracy replied, "What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?" You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks."
"If you can do a part and not have the acting show."
"I've sort of gotten into the habit of looking for the vulnerable guy, the guy who makes mistakes, the guy who can't figure things out all the time but keeps at it."
"Hollywood dishes out too much praise for small things I won't let it get me, but too much praise can turn a fellow's head if he doesn't watch his step."
"I'm going to be with Gloria now."
"Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners."
"I don't go to movies very much. In fact, I never cared for them. But when I do go, I like to watch Jimmy Stewart. I met him when he was making Strategic Air Command at St. Petersburg, Fla. and like him very much."
"Rope: Rupert Cadell"
"Harvey: Elwood P. Dowd"
"It's a Wonderful Life: George Bailey"
"Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Jefferson Smith"
"Vertigo: Detective John 'Scottie" Ferguson"
"The Philadelphia Story: Macaulay 'Mike' Connor"
"Rear Window: L.B. Jeffries"
"When you’re dealing with people who think that Sponge Bob Square Pants is more important than social security, you have a problem."
"Magnificent desolation."
"Don't waste the Earth — it is our Jewel!"
"But failure is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you are alive and growing."
"A busy eleven minutes later we were in Earth orbit. The Earth didn't look much different from the way it had during my first flight, and yet I kept looking at it. From space it has an almost benign quality. Intellectually one could realize there were wars underway, but emotionally it was impossible to understand such things. The thought reoccurred that wars are generally fought for territory or are disputes over borders; from space the arbitrary borders established on Earth cannot be seen."
"A son of the proud city of Montclair, New Jersey, Buzz made his mark in the Annals of West Point by standing first in plebe year in academics and in physical education. The proximity of his home town enabled him to escort frequently, proficiently, and with great variety. As evidenced by his fine record at the Academy, Buzz should make a capable, dependable, and efficient officer in the U.S. Air Force."
"I must say I don't object to its being called McNamara's War. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it."
"Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society."
"You can never substitute emotion for reason. I still would allow a place for intuition in this process, but not emotion. They say I am a power gabber. But knowledge is power, and I am giving them knowledge, so they will have more power. Can't they see that?"
"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it, necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."
"Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. Lesson #10: Never say never. Lesson #11: You can't change human nature..."
"I would rather have a wrong decision made than no decision at all."
"Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests, that the United States is, or should or could be the global gendarme."
"McNamara became a strong advocate of a Keynesian approach to government, using mathematical models and statistical approaches to determine troop levels, allocation of funds, and other strategies in Vietnam. His advocacy of "aggressive leadership" became a hallmark not only of government managers but also of corporate executives. It formed the basis of a new philosophical approach to teaching management at the nation's top business schools, and it ultimately led to a new breed of CEOs who would spearhead the rush to global empire... As we sat around the table discussing world events, we were especially fascinated by McNamara's role as president of the World Bank, a job he accepted soon after leaving his post as secretary of defense. Most of my friends focused on the fact that he symbolized what was popularly known as the military-industrial complex. He had held the top position in a major corporation, in a government cabinet, and now at the most powerful bank in the world. Such an apparent breach in the separation of powers horrified many of them; I may have been the only one among us who was not in the least surprised... I see now that Robert McNamara's greatest and most sinister contribution to history was to jockey the World Bank into becoming an agent of global empire on a scale never before witnessed. He also set a precedent. His ability to bridge the gaps between the primary components of the corporatocracy would be fine-tuned by his successors."
"In early July, Alain Enthoven had arranged for me to have a brief luncheon with McNamara, to discuss my work on the guidance to the JCS on the war plan, which he had already approved and sent to the Chiefs. We ate at his desk, in his office. It was scheduled to last only half an hour, but it went on nearly an hour longer. I told him about the astonishing answers the JCS had given to the questions I had drafted in the name of the president, in particular about the effects they anticipated on our own European allies from their planned attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc. I’d had no prior intention to bring up my own strongly heretical view on first use, but midway through our talk, he raised the issue himself. There was no such thing as limited nuclear war in Europe, he said. “It would be total war, total annihilation, for the Europeans!” He said this with great passion, belying his reputation as a cold, computer-like efficiency expert. Moreover, he thought it was absurd to suppose that a supposedly “limited use” would remain limited to Europe, that it would not quickly trigger general nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, to disastrous effect. I’ve never had a stronger sense in another person of a kindred awareness of this situation and intensity of his concern to change it. Thirty years later, McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances whatever should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said at this lunch. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice, and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the mad “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials (including speeches I drafted for him) throughout his years in office, as the very basis for our leadership in the alliance."
"McNamara, characteristically, transformed this reliance on irrationality into a new kind of rationality in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. He now repudiated his earlier ideas of targeting only military facilities: instead each side should target the other’s cities, with a view of causing the maximum number of casualties possible. The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD. The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one. That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all."
"We're also here to ask -- We are here to ask and we're here to ask vehemently, Where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask: Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others. Where are they now that we the men whom they sent off to war have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations, bleaching behind them in the sun in this country."
"[...]Mắc Na-ma-ra Mày trốn đâu? Giữa bãi tha ma Của toà nhà năm góc Mỗi góc một châu Mày vẫn chui đầu Trong lửa nóng Như đà điểu rúc đầu trong cát bỏng.[...]"
"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough."
"The human heart is a wide moor under a dull sky, with voices of invisible birds calling in the distance."
"The human heart is a lonely lane in the evening, and two lovers are walking down it, whispering and lingering."
"The human heart is a great green tree, and many strange birds come and sing in its branches; a few build nests, but most are from far lands north and south, and never come again."
"The human heart is a deep still pool; in it are fishes of gold and silver, darting playfully, and slow-heaving slimy monsters, and tarnished treasure hoards, the infinite animalcular life; but when you look down at it you see but your own reflected face."
"The human heart is an undiscovered country; men and women are forever perishing as they explore its wilds."
"The human heart is an egg; and out of it are hatched this world and heaven and hell."
"The human heart is a tangled wood wherein no man knows his way."
"The human heart is a roaring forge where night and day the smiths are busy fashioning swords and silver cups, mitres and engine-wheels, the tools of *labor, and the gauds of precedence."
"The human heart is a garden, wherein grow weeds of memory and blooms of hope, and the snow falls at last and covers all."
"The human heart is a meadow full of fireflies, a summer western sky of shimmering distant lightnings, a shore set round with flashing lighthouses, far-away voices calling that we cannot understand."
"The human heart is a band playing in a park at a distance; we see the crowds listening, but we catch but fragments of the music now and again, and cannot make out the tune."
"The human heart is a great city, teeming with myriad people, full of business and mighty doings, and we wander its crowded streets unutterably alone; we do not know what it is all about."
"The human heart to youth is a fairy-land of adventure, to old age it is a sitting room where one knows his way in the dark."
"The human heart is a cup of love, where some find life and zest, and some drunkenness and death."
"The human heart is the throne of God, the council-chamber of the devil, the dwelling of angels, the vile heath of witches' Sabbaths, the nursery of sweet children, the blood-spattered scene of nameless tragedies."
"Listen! You will hear mothers' lullabies, madmen's shrieks, love-croonings, cries of agonized terror, hymns of Christ, the roaring of lynch mobs, the kisses of lovers, the curses of pirates."
"Bend close! You will smell the lily fragrance of love, the stench of lust, now odors as exquisite as the very spirit of violets, and now such nauseous repulsions as words cannot tell."
"Nobilities, indecencies, heroic impulses, cowardly ravings, good and bad, white and black — the mystery of mysteries, the central island of nescience in a sea of science, the dark spot in the lighted room of knowledge, the unknown quantity, the X in the universal problem."
"Better than big business is clean business. To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean. What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while. "A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow." This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty. Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare. That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money. That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong. And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions. The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar.<brAnd the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society. Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work."
"How to control my temper."
"How to use my imagination so as to strengthen me instead of making me weak."
"How to improve and toughen my will."
"How to find pleasure in common things."
"How to get joy out of nature."
"How to curb my selfishness and develop my altruism."
"How to play fair."
"How to work so as to make work a pleasure."
"How to be a good fellow without being a fool."
"How to get stimulation out of simple food and water drink, and not alcohol."
"How to control my sex instinct so as to make it conduce my permanent happiness and not to disease, mental misery, and the wrecking of my career."
"How to make friends and keep them."
"How to handle enemies and those who wrong or offend me."
"How to get along with relatives and all those persons with whom I come in contact."
"How to value my own self-esteem more than the praise of others."
"God always whispers. At least to the soul. He may thunder to nations and speak to armies in the lightning. But to the individual His message is not in the mighty wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but in the still, small voice."
"Go into the silence. Give your soul time to calm. Let the hurly-burly die down, the crash of passion, the struggle of doubt, the pain of failure, the ranklings of wrong, the clamor of ambition. Cease from self. Be still."
"No man can tell what the whisper says. Each soul must hear for itself."
"No one thought in all the world is of more value to put life and cheer and power into a man than the thought that the great Being who made this universe is FOR us and not AGAINST US."
"THERE is a passage of Holy Writ that exhorts us that if there be any good things, such as love, virtue, truth, and so on, we ought to think on these things."
"The fact that seems to underlie this exhortation is that we become what we think about."
"Thoughts are given us, not only to chew over for ourselves, but to communicate to others. And if we can find a man that is ready to receive them, and a suitable occasion, there is nothing more pleasurable than giving them."
"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon; and when it does come my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard."
"If the general government should persist in the measures now threatened, there must be war. It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils."
"Then, Sir, we will give them the bayonet!"
"Yesterday we fought a great battle and gained a great victory, for which all the glory is due to God alone. Although under a heavy fire for several continuous hours I received only one wound, the breaking of the longest finger of my left hand; but the doctor says the finger may be saved. It was broken about midway between the hand and knuckle, the ball passing on the side next to the forefinger. Had it struck the centre, I should have lost the finger. My horse was wounded, but not killed. Your coat got an ugly wound near the hip, but my servant, who is very handy, has so far repaired it that it doesn't show very much. My preservation was entirely due, as was the glorious victory, to our God, to whom be all the honor, praise, and glory. The battle was the hardest that I have ever been in, but not near so hot in its fire."
"My dear pastor, in my tent last night, after a fatiguing day's service, I remembered that I failed to send a contribution for our colored Sunday school. Enclosed you will find a check for that object, which please acknowledge at your earliest convenience and oblige yours faithfully."
"Nothing justifies profanity."
"Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. Captain, that is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave."
"In the Army of the Shenandoah, you were the First Brigade! In the Army of the Potomac you were the First Brigade! In the Second Corps of this Army, you are the First Brigade! You are the First Brigade in the affections of your general, and I hope by your future deeds and bearing you will be handed down the posterity as the First Brigade in this our Second War of Independence. Farewell!"
"Our men fought bravely, but the enemy repulsed me. Many valuable lives were lost. Our God was my shield. His protecting care is an additional cause for gratitude."
"I yield to no man in sympathy for the gallant men under my command; but I am obliged to sweat them tonight, so that I may save their blood tomorrow. The line of hills southwest of Winchester must not be occupied by the enemy's artillery. My own must be there and in position by daylight. … You shall however have two hours rest."
"The only true rule for cavalry is to follow the enemy as long as he retreats."
"Who could not conquer with such troops as these?"
"My men have sometimes failed to take a position, but to defend one, never!"
"I see from the number of physicians that you think my condition dangerous, but I thank God, if it is His will, that I am ready to go. … It is the Lord's Day; my wish is fulfilled. … I have always desired to die on Sunday."
"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."
"I like liquor — its taste and its effects — and that is just the reason why I never drink it."
"I am more afraid of King Alcohol than of all the bullets of the enemy."
"Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible."
"War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end. To move swiftly, strike vigorously, and secure all the fruits of victory is the secret of successful war."
"Through the broad extent of country over which you have marched by your respect for the rights and property of citizens, you have shown that you were soldiers not only to defend but able and willing to defend and protect."
"Once you get them running, you stay right on top of them, and that way a small force can defeat a large one every time."
"The Institute will be heard from today."
"My duty is to obey orders."
"We must make this campaign an exceedingly active one. Only thus can a weaker country cope with a stronger; it must make up in activity what it lacks in strength. A defensive campaign can only be made successful by taking the aggressive at the proper time. Napoleon never waited for his adversary to become fully prepared, but struck him the first blow."
"Duty is ours; consequences are God's."
"Be content and resigned to God's will."
"Easy, Mr. Pendleton. Easy. Good to have your dander up, but it’s discipline that wins the day."
"You may be whatever you resolve to be."
"Disregard public opinion when it interferes with your duty."
"Sacrifice your life rather than your word."
"Endeavor to do well with everything you undertake."
"Never speak disrespectfully of anyone without a cause."
"Spare no effort to suppress selfishness, unless that effort would entail sorrow."
"Let your conduct towards men have some uniformity."
"Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."
"Speak but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation."
"Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself ; waste nothing."
"Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off unnecessary actions."
"Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly."
"Wrong no man by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty."
"Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries as much as you think they deserve."
"Be not disturbed at trifles, nor at accidents, common or unavoidable."
"It is man's highest interest not to violate, or attempt to violate, the rules which Infinite Wisdom has laid down. The means by which men are to attain great elevation may be classed in three divisions — physical, mental, and moral. Whatever relates to health, belongs to the first; whatever relates to the improvement of the mind, belongs to the second. The formation of good manners and virtuous habits constitutes the third."
"A man is known by the company he keeps."
"Good-breeding, or true politeness, is the art of showing men by external signs the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by good company. It must be acquired by practice and not by books."
"Be kind, condescending, and affable. Any one who has anything to say to a fellow-being, to say it with kind feelings and sincere desire to please; and this, whenever it is done, will atone for much awkwardness in the manner of expression."
"Good-breeding is opposed to selfishness, vanity, or pride. Never weary your company by talking too long or too frequently."
"Always look people in the face when addressing them, and generally when they address you."
"Never engross the whole conversation to yourself. Say as little of yourself and friends as possible."
"Make it a rule never to accuse without due consideration any body or association of men."
"There stands Jackson like a stone wall — rally round the Virginians!"
"In the ranks and among the officers there had been heavy losses at Bull Run, the most grievous of which was that of General Bee whose claim to fame, aside from his bravery, comes from his rallying cry to his men during the battle: "There stands Jackson like a stone wall..." And from then on, it was as though Jackson had shed his rightful name of Thomas Johnathan to become forever "Stonewall"."
"Lee, of course, was Lee. A South which had respected him, then come to adore him, now worshiped him. He was a man who grew in stature even as the cause for which he fought became less prosperous. The intensely religious Stonewall Jackson cared little for the glamor and trappings of war but believed in its righteousness with a fierceness that almost frightened those who did not know him. Comparatively, Lee was a gentle man with a mind that could not help seeing both sides of all controversies. Jackson first had to "see the right," then hell's fury could not deter him. Different as these two men were, they got along well, and each had great respect for the other. And when Lee was to hear of the wound to Jackson that later proved fatal, he wrote: "You have lost your left arm, but I have lost my right.""
"Stonewall Jackson was an intensely religious man. Once when arms were not forthcoming from Ordnance, Jackson suggested that greater trust was needed in God, whereupon an irreligious soldier proclaimed that there were more prayers in Jackson's camp than muskets. When Lee congratulated him on the course of events at Chancellorsville, Jackson replied, "The General is very kind, but the praise belongs to God." There were those who remembered him as a stern disciplinarian, a driving drill master. But all respected him as a military leader and as a man. Wearing a battered old flat-topped forage hat that everybody knew, he would bring new heart to those who, upon seeing him, would shout to their fellows over the din of battle, "Here comes Old Jack!""
"As for Lee, long afterward in speaking of Gettysburg, he is reported to have remarked that he thought he could have carried the day if Stonewall Jackson had been at his side."
"Jackson fought for the constitutional rights of the South, and any one who imagines he fought for slavery knows nothing of Jackson."
"It cannot well be denied that Jackson possessed every single attribute which makes for success in war. Morally and physically he was absolutely fearless. He accepted responsibility with the same equanimity that he faced the bullets of the enemy. He permitted no obstacle to turn him aside from his appointed path, and in seizing an opportunity or in following up a victory he was the very incarnation of untiring energy. … A supreme activity, both of brain and body, was a prominent characteristic of his military life. His idea of strategy was to secure the initiative, however inferior his force; to create opportunities and to utilise them; to waste no time, and to give the enemy no rest. ...That he felt to the full the fascination of war's tremendous game we can hardly doubt. Not only did he derive, as all true soldiers must, an intense intellectual pleasure from handling his troops in battle so as to outwit and defeat his adversary, but from the day he first smelt powder in Mexico until he led that astonishing charge through the dark depths of the Wilderness his spirits never rose higher than when danger and death were rife about him. With all his gentleness there was much of the old Berserker about Stonewall Jackson, not indeed the lust for blood, but the longing to do doughtily and die bravely, as best becomes a man. His nature was essentially aggressive. He was never more to be feared than when he was retreating, and where others thought only of strong defensive positions he looked persistently for the opportunity to attack."
"In early 1861, Professor Thomas Jonathan Jackson was an unhappy, unpopular professor of artillery, optics, mathematics and astronomy at the Virginia Military Institute. Remarried after the death of his first wife, the deeply religious Jackson believed in predestination: Everything that happened to him was intended to happen. Conversely, one of his frequently stated maxims was, "You can be whatever you will." Guided by these two contradictory ideas, he became a fearless commander. If the Civil War had not happened, Jackson likely would have passed the rest of his life as a teacher, spending his spare time boning up on unfamiliar subjects, practicing his lectures, and spending time with his daughter. Instead, he was thrust into leadership positions. The Civil War changed his life forever, and his death changed the course of the war."
"At the First Battle of Bull Run, three months after the opening of the war, Confederate troops were fleeing until Jackson took the field and not only stopped the retreat but ordered an attack. When he raised his left hand, it was shot through. He tied it up with a handkerchief and kept fighting. Soon the Union forces retreated, overrunning the spectators in carriages who had come out from Washington to "watch the war." Supposedly, General Barnard Bee pointed out Jackson and cried, "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians." Thus Jackson acquired his nickname. After Bull Run, "Stonewall" Jackson was assigned to defend the Valley of Virginia, the "breadbasket of the Confederacy," a task he performed so brilliantly that military strategists still study his campaigns with awe. A strict disciplinarian, he drove his men almost to the breaking point, but after each battle he said prayers of thanksgiving and always reminded them that God was with them. In fact, Jackson's tactics were so effective that some military historians think that if the war had been fought only in Virginia, the Confederacy could have won. However, events elsewhere turned the tide. Jackson's part in the war lasted less than two years."
"According to legend, Jackson's final words were, "Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees." Then he died peacefully. When Jackson's body was taken through Richmond, accompanied by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, thousands turned out to mourn. General Lee called Jackson the world's best executive officer and said, "Jackson lost his left arm, but in him I have lost my right." In two years Jackson went from being a colonel teaching at a small military school to being a general known and revered throughout the Confederacy. He is the best-known Civil War commander, after Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee."
"You are better off than I am, for while you have lost your left, I have lost my right arm."
"Jackson neither apologized for nor spoke in favor of the practice of slavery. He probably opposed the institution. Yet in his mind the Creator had sanctioned slavery, and man had no moral right to challenge its existence. The good Christian slaveholder was one who treated his servants fairly and humanely at all times."
"Returning home on leave following my second year at West Point, I called on a great-uncle who had joined the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen and had fought in a number of major Civil War battles, including Gettysburg, and had been with Robert E. Lee at Appamatox. My Uncle White was the younger brother of my grandfather. He hated Yankees and Republicans, not necessarily in that order, and talked derisively about both. When I visited, he was seated in a wheel chair, in grudging acquiescence to the infirmities of age. Tobacco juice decorated his shirt and stains around a spittoon on the floor testified to the inaccuracy of his aim. Flies buzzed through screenless windows. "What are you doing with yourself, son?" Uncle White asked. I answered the old veteran with trepidation. "I'm going to that same school that Grant and Sherman went to, the Military Academy at West Point, New York." Uncle White was silent for what seemed like a long time. "That's all right, son," he said at last. "Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there too.""
"When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel that this country united has practically nothing to fear, while the apathy and divisions stirred up by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging."
"The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. The latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system."
"The decision to weigh Lieut. Gen. Patton's great services to his country, in World War I and World War II, from these shores to Casablanca and through Tunisia to triumph in Sicily, on the one hand, against an indefensible act on the other, was Gen. Eisenhower's. As his report shows, General Eisenhower in making his decision also considered the value to our country of General Patton's aggressive, winning leadership in the bitter battles which are to come before final victory. I am confident that you will agree with me that Gen. Eisenhower's decision, under these difficult circumstances, was right and proper."
"The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust."
"Gentlemen don't read each other's mail."
"The only deadly sin I know is cynicism."
"we needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act"
"I remember Mr. Stimson saying to me that he thought it appalling that there should be no protests over the air raids which we were conducting over Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn't say that the air strikes shouldn't be carried on, but he did think that there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that ..."
"The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ."
"Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors -- in short, over every aspect and institution of human society."
"How much more forcefully can I say it? The time has come, and it is long overdue, when Christians and conservatives and all men and women who believe in the birthright of freedom must rise up and reclaim America for Jesus Christ."
"The intimate coupling of two men or two women is not marriage. It is a pale and misshapen counterfeit that will only serve to empty marriage of its meaning and destroy the institution that is the keystone in the arch of civilization … Marriage is the sine qua non for healthy children and a stable society. It is 'fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race'..."
"Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved society. When you have an immoral society that has blatantly, proudly, violated all of the commandments of God, there is one last virtue they insist upon: tolerance for their immorality. They will not have you condemning what they have done as being wrong, and they have created a belief system in which it is not, and in which they are no longer the criminal or the villain or the evil person, but you are!"
"The whole, though larger than any of its parts, does not necessarily obscure their separate identities."
"Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others."
"We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness' shows how size can become a menace – both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace – because of its control of prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression – an economy of abundance or scarcity. Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis, size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it."
"The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion. As Chief Justice Hughes wrote in De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 365, 260, it is only through free debate and free exchange of ideas that government remains responsive to the will of the people and peaceful change is effected. The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes. Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, supra, 315 U.S. at pages 571-572, 62 S.Ct. at page 769, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. See Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, 262, 193, 159 A.L.R. 1346; Craig v. Harney, 331 U.S. 367, 373, 1253. There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.Terminiello, 337 U.S. at 4-5."
"Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions."
"Our recent decisions make plain that we do not sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation nor to decide whether the policy which it expresses offends the public welfare."
"We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive."
"We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
"The Congress, as well as the President, is trustee of the national welfare. The President can act more quickly than the Congress. The President with the armed services at his disposal can move with force as well as with speed. All executive power — from the reign of ancient kings to the rule of modern dictators — has the outward appearance of efficiency. Legislative power, by contrast, is slower to exercise. There must be delay while the ponderous machinery of committees, hearings, and debates is put into motion. That takes time; and while the Congress slowly moves into action, the emergency may take its toll in wages, consumer goods, war production, the standard of living of the people, and perhaps even lives. Legislative action may indeed often be cumbersome, time-consuming, and apparently inefficient. But as [[Louis Brandeis|Mr. Justice Brandeis] stated in his dissent in Myers v. United States, 272 U. S. 52, 293:"
"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly; and the citizen can take matters in his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."
"No matter what the legislature may say, a man has the right to make his speech, print his handbill, compose his newspaper, and deliver his sermon without asking anyone's permission. The contrary suggestion is abhorrent to our traditions."
"The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government."
"Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience … that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance."
"That seems to us to be the common sense of the matter; and common sense often makes good law."
"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."
"Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don’t like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts". This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win."
"The Constitution favors no racial group, no political or social group."
"The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments could mean only one thing — one person, one vote."
"We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights -- older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions."
"We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government."
"These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will."
"The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton."
"Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole – a creature of ecclesiastical law – is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases....So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.""
"He was, however, speaking to a representative of government, the police. And it is to government that one goes 'for a redress of grievances,' to use an almost forgotten phrase of the First Amendment. But it is said that the purpose was 'to cause inconvenience and annoyance.' Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet."
"This case involves a cancer in our body politic. It is a measure of the disease which afflicts us. Army surveillance, like Army regimentation, is at war with the principles of the First Amendment. Those who already walk submissively will say there is no cause for alarm. But submissiveness is not our heritage. The First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our heritage. The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and expression, of the press, of political and social activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. The aim was to allow men to be free and independent and to assert their rights against government. There can be no influence more paralyzing of that objective than Army surveillance. When an intelligence officer looks over every nonconformist's shoulder in the library, or walks invisibly by his side in a picket line, or infiltrates his club, the America once extolled as the voice of liberty heard around the world no longer is cast in the image which Jefferson and Madison designed, but more in the Russian image."
"When man was first in the jungle, he took care of himself. When he entered a societal group, controls were necessarily imposed. But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is the article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world."
"For there is no constitutional right for any race to be preferred... If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with "compelling" reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordion-like quality."
"The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone."
"The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market."
"One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations. Enormous spiritual sacrifices are made in the transformation of shopkeepers into employees... The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation in much the same manner as he has been submerged in the state in other lands."
"The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed."
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. We need all the ingenuity we possess to avert the holocaust."
"These days I see America identified more and more with material things, less and less with spiritual standards. These days I see America acting abroad as an arrogant, selfish, greedy nation interested only in guns and dollars, not in people and their hopes and aspirations. We need a faith that dedicates us to something bigger and more important than ourselves or our possessions. Only if we have that faith will we be able to guide the destiny of nations in this the most critical period of world history."
"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.""
"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."
"The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend, one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized."
"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation."
"The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it."
"The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected."
"The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth."
"Christianity has sufficient inner strength to survive and flourish on its own. It does not need state subsidies, nor state privileges, nor state prestige. The more it obtains state support the greater it curtails human freedom."
"I've often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers."
"The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified."
"The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership."
"The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience."
"It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off."
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
"Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back."
"One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment, Potter."
"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
"The continuing episodes of protest and dissent in the United States have their basis in the First Amendment to the Constitution, a great safety valve that is lacking in most other nations of the world. The First Amendment creates a sanctuary around the citizen’s beliefs. His ideas, his conscience, his convictions are his own concern, not the government’s."
"At the international level we have become virtually paranoid. The world is filled with dangerous people. Every troublemaker across the globe is a communist. Our obsession is in part the product of a fear generated by Joseph McCarthy. Indeed a black silence of fear possesses the nation and is causing us to jettison some of our libertarian traditions."
"But the fact that communists may have provoked some of the present dissent in the United States is not, as some would have it, the end of the matter. The voices are not communist, for those in rebellion see communism as an even more vicious form of a status quo. The merits must be voted up or voted down."
"The First Amendment was designed so as to permit a flowering of man and his idiosyncracies, but we have greatly diluted it. Although the Amendment says that Congress shall make ‘no law’ abridging freedom of speech and press, this has been construed to mean that Congress may make ‘some laws’ that abridge that freedom."
"A person may be convicted for making a speech or for pamphleteering if a judge rules ex post facto that the speaker or publisher created a ‘clear and present danger’ that his forbidden or revolutionary thesis would be accepted by a least some of the audience."
"But the case against the university is that it is chiefly a handmaiden of the state or of industry or, worse yet, of the military-industrial complex."
"When the university does not sit apart, critical of industry, the Pentagon, and government, there is no fermentative force at work in our society. The university becomes a collection of technicians in a service station, trying to turn out better technocrats for the technological society. Then all voices become a chorus supporting the status quo; there is no challenger from the opposition warning of dangers to come."
"A man's belief is his own; he is the keeper of his conscience; Big Brother has no rightful concern in these areas."
"Ideological data—like personality data—is treacherous when fed into a computer. For by its use the loyalty and security board’s failure or refusal to clear a person becomes a virtually incontestable ‘fact.’ All one has to do now is to press the ‘subversive’ button and all the names of ‘dangerous’ people come tumbling out."
"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operations, to scientific advancement, and the like. The cause of privacy will be won or lost essentially in legislative halls and in constitutional assemblies. If it is won, this pluralistic society of ours will experience a spiritual renewal. If it is lost we will have written our own prescription for mediocrity and conformity."
"Electronic surveillance, as well as old-fashioned wire tapping, has brought Big Brother closer to everyone and has produced a like leveling effect… But the Administration soon broadened that category to include domestic groups who attempt to use unlawful means to ‘attack the existing structure of government.’ The Wall Street Journal sounded the alarm that such board surveillance ‘could lead to the harassment of lawful dissenters.’"
"There is more knowledge and information than ever before: the experts have so multiplied that man has a new sense of importance; man is indeed about to be delivered over to them. Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman."
"The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer."
"Yet more and more of the youth of America are instinctively horrified at the way President Johnson avoided all constitutional procedures and slyly maneuvered us into an Asian war. There was no national debate over a declaration of war. The lies and half-truths that were told, and the phony excuses gradually advanced, made most Americans dubious of the integrity of our leadership."
"If the war that comes is a nuclear conflict, the end of planetary life is probable. If it is a war with conventional weapons, bankruptcy is inevitable. Modern technological war is much too expensive to fight. Vietnam has bled our country at the rate of 2.5 billion dollars a month."
"We are witnessing, I think, a new American phenomenon. The two parties have become almost indistinguishable; and each is controlled by the Establishment."
"There always have been—and always will be—aggrieved persons. The lower their estate the more difficult it is to find a right to fit the wrong being done. Part of our problem starts at that point. In New York City a housing complaint must go to one of the nineteen bureaus that deal with those problems. It takes a sharp and energetic layman or lawyer to find the proper desk in the bureaucracy where the complaint must be lodged."
"Our militarism threatens to become more and more the dominant force in our lives. This is an inflammatory issue; and dissent on it will not be stilled."
"I believe it was Charles Adams who described our upside down welfare state as ‘socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.’ The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people."
"The federal food program is not responsive to that growing need. It is designed by the agro-business lobby to restrict production, keep prices high, and assure profits to the producers. That lobby controls the Department of Agriculture, which as a result has made feeding the poor a subordinate and secondary function."
"We must realize that today's Establishment is the New George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution."
"[One of the] two completely evil men I have ever met."
"Absolute authority will be delegated. Full responsibility will be assumed. Those who succeed will receive advancement and satisfaction of desire. Those who fail will die."
"When I was a high school government teacher, I used to remind my students that TO VOTE IS TO HAVE A VOICE. That simple idea is the cornerstone of our democratic process. During my eight years as secretary of state, nothing has made me more proud than the fact that we have set all-time records for both voter registration and voting. … As Election Day approaches, I urge every Iowan to use your voice, to make yourself heard as a citizen of the United States and a proud Iowan. Please vote today. You truly hold the key to leading this state forward."
"We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, more loyal to follow it, whither soever it leads."
"From the empty grave of Jesus the enemies of the cross turn away in unconcealable dismay. Christ has risen from the dead! After two thousand years of the most determined assault upon the evidence which establishes it, that fact stands. And so long as it stands, Christianity too must stand as the one supernatural religion. The resurrection of Christ is the fundamental apologetical fact of Christianity."
"Silicon Valley is 130 miles from Sacramento, but it might as well be a million miles away given how it operates."
"A monkey could drive this train."
"Kenya is well-positioned to be an African leader in information technology, telecommunications, and mobile banking and is open to partnering with the United States."
"Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft sweet accent of an angel’s whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence. ’T was the name for which my soul had panted for years, as the hart panteth for the water-brooks."
"I think every gentleman on this floor is as well satisfied as I am that Duluth is destined to become the commercial metropolis of the universe, and that this road should be built at once."
"The four most expensive words in the English language are "this time it’s different.""
"We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities."
"High ethics and religious principles form the basis for success and happiness in every area of life."
"I focus on spiritual wealth now, and I'm busier, more enthusiastic, and more joyful than I have ever been."
"I have no quarrel with what I learned in the Presbyterian church — I am still an enthusiastic Christian. But why shouldn't I try to learn more? Why shouldn't I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn't I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more."
"I served for 42 years on the board of trustees of the largest Presbyterian seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and we had brilliant people — teachers and students both — but they did not come up with many new concepts. They weren't invited to come up with new concepts. Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church."
"I thought, I'm only going to be on this planet once, and only for a short time. What can I do with my life that will lead to permanent benefits?"
"If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search."
"I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago."
"In my 45-year career as an investment counselor, humility did show me the need for worldwide diversification to reduce risk. That career did help me to become more and more humble because statistics showed that when I advised a client to buy one stock to replace another, about one-third of the time the client would have done better to ignore my advice. In other endeavors, humility about how little I know has encouraged me to listen more carefully and more wisely."
"Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension."
"The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be. It's self centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity."
"The main focus in my life now is to open people's minds so no one will be so conceited that they think they have the total truth. They should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them."
"The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and therefore we should be eager to search and to learn."
"The other boys at Yale came from wealthy families, and none of them were investing outside the United States, and I thought, 'That is very egotistical. Why be so shortsighted or near-sighted as to focus only on America? Shouldn't you be more open-minded?"
"The question is not is there a God, but is there anything else except God? God is everyone and each of us is a little bit."
"We hope that there will be nothing that conflicts with anybody's religion or faith. We would never say a person's religion is not effective. We say, "Would you be interested in something more effective?" We always put things in an optimistic, progressive perspective. Do you want to make your prayers more effective? Not that they are not effective, but do you want to help them become more effective?"
"We may find the Divine to be 3,000 times what we think it is now. It's like asking the tulip there to explain you. The tulip is a beautiful creation, with millions of atoms cooperating with each other to produce great beauty, but ask that tulip to talk about you, and it can't do it. It doesn't have those perceptive abilities. Wouldn't it be conceited to suggest that I had the abilities to describe the deity?"
"Work at being a humble person."
"Those who spend too much will eventually be owned by those who are thrifty."
"While the vast majority of America's philanthropic heavyweights choose to address traditional and tangible social needs — feeding the hungry, curing the sick, subsidizing the arts — Templeton has something else in mind. He wants to make an impact on the world of ideas. Templeton's controversial goal: to reconcile the worlds of science and religion. … When he hears scientists quarrel with believers, he thinks both sides are missing the broader point. "What I'm trying to do is say: 'Don't try to argue — maybe you're both right'...""
"Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids."
"The Court is perhaps one of the last citadels of jealously preserved individualism. For the most part, we function as nine, small independent law firms."
"I don't believe I've ever met a homosexual"
"I know of no other nation in history that deliberately fought a major war with no intention or effort to use its full available forces to carry the war to the enemy's heartland: in Vietnam the capability to do so clearly existed. The effect of this strategy on the attitudes of our own people, and on foreign attitudes toward America, are well known. Less well known are its consequences in Southeast Asia, which include the exodus of the boat people from Vietnam and the Communist genocide in Cambodia."
"It was abundantly clear from his letters that, virtually to the end, he remained deeply interested in national and world events. Yet he never ceased to engage in self-deprecating humor. I have a file containing a decade of correspondence with my dear friend. It is a file that I will keep. Max's death on April 19 was not unexpected and I am sure he would have viewed it as merciful. At the moving funeral service at Fort Meyer, Ambassador Philip Bonsal, a respected diplomat and longtime friend of the Taylors', spoke eloquently of General Taylor's "example", and correctly said that his friendship would remain a constant treasure in the lives of all of us who knew him. His younger son Tom's superb tribute brought tears to the eyes of most of us. He emphasized the closeness of the Taylor family- a closeness not often found in the lives of the world's great leaders. It typifies the mind and spirit that I was privileged to know. Maxwell Taylor's place in history will be a large one."
"I think I probably made a mistake in the Hardwick case... I do think it was inconsistent in a general way with Roe. When I had the opportunity to reread the opinions a few months later, I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments."
"When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else."
"Because I can understand the English language. It is my mother tongue."
"Oh! for this baptism of fire! when every spoken word for Jesus shall be a thunderbolt, and every prayer shall bring forth a mighty flood."
"This Bible, then, has a mission, grander than any mere creation of God; for in this volume are infinite wisdom, and infinite love. Between its covers are the mind and heart of God; and they are for man's good, for his salvation, his guidance, his spiritual nourishment. If now I neglect my Bible, I do my soul a wrong; for the fact of this Divine message is evidence that I need it."
"Throw away the Old Testament! What part of it will you throw away? That which I do not understand? Take down then yonder blood-stained cross; for there is a love there "which passeth knowledge," and a Divine hatred of sin which shook the solid earth."
"Christianity claims that the supernatural is as reasonable as the natural, that man himself is supernatural as truly as he is natural, and that the Bible is so clearly the word of God by proofs that are unanswerable, that it is unreasonable to disbelieve its divine truths."
"Parents, I urge you to make the Bible the sweetest, the dearest book to your children; not by compelling them to read so many chapters each day, which will have the effect of making them hate the Bible, but by reading its pages with them, and by your tender parental love, so showing them the beauty of its wondrous incidents, from the story of Adam and Eve to the story of Bethlehem and Calvary, that no book in the home will be so dear to your children as the Bible; and thus you will be strengthening their minds with the sublimest truths, storing their hearts with the purest love, and sinking deep in their souls solid principles of righteousness, whose divine stones no waves of temptation can ever move."
"The "wise men " were journeying to the manger — we to the throne. They to see a babe — we to look upon the King in His beauty. They to kneel and worship — we to sit with Him on His throne. That trembling star shone for them through the darkness of the night, lighting their way — Jesus is always with us, our star of hope; and the pathway is never dark where He leads; for He giveth "songs in the night.""
"The whole history of Israel, its ritual and its government, is explicable only as it is typical of the spiritual Israel, of the sacrifice on Calvary, of the precious blood which alone can wash away sin."
"The hoary centuries are full of Him; the echoes of His sweet voice are heard to-day; His love has perfumed the past eighteen hundred years, and He lives to-day, as the Head of His church; He lives to-day, the object of the warmest adoration, the most passionate love, for whom millions would die this very hour. Empires have fallen, thrones have crumbled; but Jesus lives, His empire extending every day, His throne gaining new trophies of His grace."
"Now it is the blood of Jesus which saves, and it is the same blood which cleanses and sanctifies; and as we had to come lo Jesus to be plunged into the fountain, so we have to abide in Jesus by fellowship, to grow up into Christlikeness."
"I love to think of Him in the world of light to-day, my brother; mine though angels bow before Him, and archangels veil their faces; mine though I am very far from heaven's holiness and heaven's joy; yet He is my brother, and every beating of His heart is a brother's love for me, and though high and lifted up, H'sarm, a brother's, is around me, and will keep me and uphold me, until He gives me a brother's welcome to His and my home in the better land."
"Jesus lives! the same comforting, helping, instructing, loving Elder Brother, as when John leaned on His bosom, as when He lifted Peter up from the waves, as when He dried Mary's tears with His, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." Jesus lives! the same almighty Saviour, Guide, Intercessor, as when He ascended to glory with the broken fetters of sin and death in His pierced hands."
"To multitudes of sufferers on beds of pain and languishing, Jesus has been the great physician to-day; in many a weeping circle around precious dust, He has been the Divine comforter, and the tears have almost ceased to flow as this Jesus has touched the bier. Dying lips have whispered His name, and the valley of the shadow has been illumined as with the glory from the celestial shores."
"A divine life is hidden in every seed we sow for Jesus. It matters not how small the seed may be, nor in what secluded part of the vineyard it may be sown — a prayer, a word, a look, a pressure of the hand — God's almighty energy is enfolded in every seed which we sow in the Master's name and for His glory."
"I know that with consecration on the part of believers, separation from the world, disentanglement from enslaving sins, and a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit, the church would become a conquering power in the world, not by its constructed theology, not by its Sabbath services, not by its arguments to convince the intellect, but by its simple story of Jesus' love, by the CROSS, the CROSS — God's hammer, God's fire."
"Do you recall the laughter of the Philistines at the helpless Sampson? You can hear the echo of that laughter to-day, as the church, shorn of her strength by her own sin, is an object of ridicule to the world, who cry in derision, "Where is your boasted triumph and your Millennial glory?""
"And this is the mission of the church — not civilization, but salvation — not better laws, purer legislation, social elevation, human equality, and liberty, but FIRST, the " kingdom of God and His righteousness;" regenerated hearts, and all other things will follow."
"A love to Christ which is so cowardly and selfish that it is unwilling to proclaim by a public confession its faith in Him who hung before all the world crucified for sinners, is a love which is hardly worth the name."
"This bread and wine are the simple but eloquent monument to the infinite love of the Son of God, around which we gather with tender, tearful gratitude, because He loved us'so, and because we know that our garlands of affection and consecration are pleasing to Him."
"Beloved, I congratulate you, that you are at the feast of redeeming love, that you know the riches of grace in Christ Jesus; but this is only the "early meal" (introductory feast); the " grand supper "is awaiting you, at the close of the day, in the palace of the King, where the fellowship will be perfect and eternal, where the table will be beyond all the mists and fogs of sin, where death never enters to disturb the festivities, and where we shall see the Lamb face to face. O! if the feast with Jesus here is so precious, what, what must heaven be!"
"The Lord's Supper! the marriage supper of the Lamb! There are vacant seats around the table here. Will there be dear ones missed at the table there?"
"If you and I shall, like the believing shepherds, watch and long for His appearing, one day we, too, shall hear a music grander and sweeter even than the song of angels, when the great Composer shall transpose all the strains of earth from the minor into the major, when the wail of nature shall give way to the glad harmony of the everlasting jubilee."
"Dear friends, have you begun to sing the "new song? " Loved ones are singing it in the heavenly home, and we may sing it here; and by and by we shall join them, gaze with them on the risen, glorified Lord, and our voices will mingle in the "new song" "unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.""
""I am trying to trust," said one to me this past week, who had heard the earth falling on the casket which held the cold form of the dearest human friend, " I am trying to trust," and so I have seen a bird with a broken wing trying to fly. When the heart is broken, all our trying will only increase our pain and unrest. But if, instead of trying to trust, we will press closer to the Comforter, and lean our weary heads upon His sufficient grace, the trust will come without our trying, and the promised "perfect peace" will calm every troubled wave of sorrow."
"O! to abide ever in Christ— to know His fellowship, to keep our hearts resting upon His infinite love, and there to grow from spiritual infancy to the full stature in holiness and love and joy and peace. May this be your experience every day and hour, strong in Him, fruitful in Him, happy in Him, until with the crumbling of the tabernacle of clay, the fellowship is perfect in the house not made with hands, where we shall see Him as He is."
"Modern engineers, after having erected a viaduct, insist upon subjecting it to a severe strain by a formal trial trip, before allowing it to be opened for public traffic; and it would almost seem that God, in employing moral agents for the carrying out of His purposes, secures that they shall be tested by some dreadful ordeal, before He fully commits to them the work which He wishes them to perform."
"Up with the banner of your new Lord, Jehovah Jesus! Raise it in firm decision, with quiet earnestness and with humble prayer; keep it with unflinching fortitude, and be ready to die rather than dishonor it."
"The lack of brotherhood among believers themselves has paralyzed the church in front of the skepticism and immorality of the world; but when we go back in simple faith to the one great fact of our redemption, we shall be both brought into closer fellowship with each other, and stimulated to more tender regard for the salvation of men."
"You may be quite sure that if little light comes from a Christian character, little light comes into it. We must have the glory sink into us before it can be reflected from us. But let the love of Jesus become the master-principle of our hearts, and there will be no halting or irresolution; no parleying with temptation; no seeking to explain away our duty under color of deliberating to discover what it is; no looking one way and walking another; but with undivided souls, and with enthusiastic devotion, we shall do only and always the will of Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us."
"So, my brethren, let us do our work, that others entering on it may carry it forward through after generations. Thus shall the work of the fathers become the glory of fheir children; and in the end, when the mystery of God shall be finished, we shall see, in its completed beauty and proportion, the great fabric into which we put our little all; and we shall rejoice at once in the skill of the Architect and the diligence of the successive builders."
"So, from generation to generation, the spiritual church is rising upwards toward its perfection; and, though one after another the workmen pass away, the fabric remains, and the great Master-builder carries on the undertaking. Be it ours to build in our portion in a solid and substantial manner, so that they who come after us may be at once thankful for our thoroughness, and inspired by our example."
"It is better to have a plain, substantial building, with no extravagance about it, but without a debt, than to have the most splendid specimen of Gothic architecture that is overlaid by a mortgage."
"We can set our deeds to the music of a grateful heart, and seek to round our lives into a hymn — the melody of which will be recognized by all who come in contact with us, and the power of which shall not be evanescent, like the voice of the singer, but perenninal, like the music of the spheres."
"Palestine was the West Point and Annapolis for the world. In that little country God was training up a people out of whom, when the fullness of the time should come, His gospel cadets should emerge, fitted by all the training of all their national history for going out among the heathen and proclaiming the unsearchable riches of Christ."
"The whole track of history is marked with the ruin of empires which having been founded in injustice, or perpetuated by wrong, were ultimately destroyed."
"The great moral lesson which Saul's history leaves for the instruction of mankind is this: That without true piety the finest qualities of character and the highest position in society will utterly fail to make a true and noble man. If Saul's heart had been true to God, he would have been one of the grandest specimens of humanity; but, lacking this true obedience to God, he made his life an utter failure, and his character amoral wreck."
"Prayers born out of murmuring are always dangerous. When, therefore, we are in a discontented mood, let'us take care what we cry for, lest God give it to us, and thereby punish us."
"They tell us of the fixed laws of nature! but who dares maintain that He who fixed these laws cannot use them for the purpose of answering His people's prayers?"
"True repentance has as its constituent elements not only grief and hatred of sin, but also an apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ. It hates the sin, and not simply the penalty; and it hates the sin most of all because it has discovered God's love."
"You cannot stay the shell in its flight; after it has left the mortar, it goes on to its mark, and there explodes, dealing destruction all around. Just as little can you stay the consequences of a sin after it has been committed. You may repent of it, you may even be forgiven for it, but still it goes on its deadly and desolating way. It has passed entirely beyond your reach; once done, it cannot be undone."
"I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment."
"It's quite interesting to think about Wal-Mart starting from a single store in Bentonville, Arkansas against Sears, Roebuck with its name, reputation and all of its billions. How does a guy in Bentonville, Arkansas with no money blow right by Sears, Roebuck? And he does it in his own lifetime — in fact, during his own late lifetime because he was already pretty old by the time he started out with one little store.... He played the chain store game harder and better than anyone else. Walton invented practically nothing. But he copied everything anybody else ever did that was smart — and he did it with more fanaticism and better employee manipulation. So he just blew right by them all. He also had a very interesting competitive strategy in the early days. He was like a prizefighter who wanted a great record so he could be in the finals and make a big TV hit. So what did he do? He went out and fought 42 palookas. Right? And the result was knockout, knockout, knockout — 42 times. Walton, being as shrewd as he was, basically broke other small town merchants in the early days. With his more efficient system, he might not have been able to tackle some titan head-on at the time. But with his better system, he could destroy those small town merchants. And he went around doing it time after time after time. Then, as he got bigger, he started destroying the big boys. Well, that was a very, very shrewd strategy."
"We should also implement a 10 percent surtax on the value of estates above $1 billion to break up the extreme wealth of the 540 billionaires in the United States-the wealthiest 0.0002 percent of America-and end tax breaks for dynasty trusts. This includes eliminating the so-called "grantor retained annuity trust," and the "generation-skipping tax," whose loopholes have allowed billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart, to legally manipulate the rules for trusts passed on from one generation to the next without paying estate or gift taxes, resulting in savings of $100 billion in taxes since 2000."
"If your path had been smooth, you would have depended upon your own surefootedness; but God roughened the path, so you have to take hold of His hand. If the weather had been mild, you would have loitered along the watercourses, but at the first howl of the storm you quickened your pace heavenward and wrapped around you the warm robe of Saviour’s righteousness."
"If the statistics of any of our cities could be taken on this subject you would find that a vast multitude of women not only support themselves, but masculines also. A great legion of men amount to nothing, and a woman by marriage manacled to one of these nonentities needs condolence. A woman standing outside the marriage relation is several hundred thousand times better off than a woman badly married."
"At the beginning God said: “Let there be light,” and light was, and light is, and light shall be. So Christianity is rolling on, and it is going to warm all nations, and all nations are to bask in its light. Men may shut the window-blinds so they cannot see it, or they may smoke the pipe of speculation until they are shadowed under their own vaporing; but the Lord God is a sun!"
"I like the Bible folded between lids of cloth, or calfskin, or morocco, but I like it better when, in the shape of a man, it goes out into the world—a Bible illustrated."
"You have a valuable house or farm. It is suggested that the title is not good. You employ counsel. You have the deeds examined. You search the records for mortgages, judgments and liens. You are not satisfied until you have a certificate, signed by the great seal of the State, assuring you that the title is good. Yet how many leave their title to heaven an undecided matter! Why do you not go to the records and find it? Give yourself no rest day or night until you can read your title clear to mansions in the skies.""
"The Bible is a warm letter of affection from a parent to a child; and yet there are many who see chiefly the severer passages. As there may be fifty or sixty nights of gentle dews in one summer, that will not cause as much remark as one hailstorm of half an hour, so there are those who are more struck by those passages of the Bible that announce the indignation of God than by those that announce His affection."
"Bring the little ones to Christ. Lord Jesus, we bring them to-day, the children of our Sunday-schools, of our churches, of the streets. Here they are; they wait Thy benediction. The prayer of Jacob for his sons shall be my prayer while I live, and when I die: " The angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads.""
"The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together."
"Not only mesons are interesting..."
"No one has ever suggested that tax exemption has converted libraries, art galleries, or hospitals into arms of the state or employees "on the public payroll." There is no genuine nexus between tax exemption and establishment of religion."
"In my conception of it, the primary role of the Court is to decide cases. From the decision of cases, of course, some changes develop, but to try to create or substantially change civil or criminal procedure, for example, by judicial decision is the worst possible way to do it. The Supreme Court is simply not equipped to do that job properly."
"History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality."
"The policeman on the beat or in the patrol car makes more decisions and exercises broader discretion affecting the daily lives of people every day and to a greater extent, in many respects, than a judge will ordinarily exercise in a week."
"No matter what coercive powers of enforcement governments may assert, the peoples in country after country in all ages have demonstrated that Man was meant to be free but that this ideal can be realized only under the rule of law. And this must be a rule that places restraints on individuals and on governments alike. This is a delicate, a fragile, balance to maintain. It is fragile because it is sustained only by an ideal that requires each person in society, by an exercise of free will, to accept and abide the restraints of a structure of laws."
"We are more casual about qualifying the people we allow to act as advocates in the courtroom than we are about licensing electricians. No other profession is as casual or heedless of reality as ours"
"The entire legal profession - lawyers, judges, law teachers - has become so mesmerized with the stimulation of the courtroom contest that we tend to forget that we ought to be healers - healers of conflicts. Doctors, in spite of astronomical medical costs, still retain a high degree of public confidence, because they are perceived as healers. Should lawyers not be healers? Healers, not warriors? Healers, not procurers? Healers, not hired guns?"
"For some disputes, trials will be the only means, but for many claims, trial by adversarial contest must go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood. Our trials are too costly, too painful, too destructive, too inefficient for a truly civilized people."
"If I were writing the Bill of Rights now there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment . . . . This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
"You must make your choice whether to hold on to some thing which cannot save you, or let go, and fall into the hands of the Lord."
"You have "done all you could" to save yourself; and yet you have accomplished nothing. Fly, then, to Christ, — to Christ, just as you are, just as unworthy — to Christ now, "while it is called to-day." Be assured you are welcomed to all His benefits."
"There are multitudes in our congregations who are just waiting while they ought to be acting. They must work, if they would have God work in them. There can be no religion without obedience."
"My observation continues to confirm me more and more in the opinion, that to experience religion is to experience the truth of the great doctrines of Divine grace."
"Decision is a vastly important thing with a convicted sinner. He must choose, or he must be lost. If he will not do it, he may expect the Divine Spirit to depart from him, and leave him to his own way."
"Disordered nerves are the origin of much religious despair, when the individual does not suspect it; and then the body and mind have a reciprocal influence upon each other, and it is difficult to tell which influences the other most. The physician is often blamed, when the fault lies with the minister. Depression never benefits body or soul. We are saved by hope."
"He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will see the defect when the weavingof a life-time is unrolled. Neglect of one duty often renders us unfit for another. God "is a rewarder," and one great principle on which He dispenses His rewards is this — through our faithfulness in one thing He bestows grace upon us to be faithful in another."
"It is a great truth, "God reigns," and therefore grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord; and, therefore, no sinner on earth need ever despair."
"There is no reason to believe that the Holy Spirit ever leaves awakened sinners, only as they leave the truth of God for some error or sin."
"The Holy Spirit would lead us to think much upon our own sins. It is a dangerous thing for us to dwell upon the imperfections of others."
"Whoever believes in a God at all, believes in an infinite mystery; and if the existence of God is such an infinite mystery, we can very well expect and afford to have many of His ways mysterious to us."
"Spiritual pride is the worst of all pride, if it is not the worst snare of the devil. The heart is peculiarly deceitful on just this one thing."
"What hinders that you should be a child of God? Is not salvation free? Is not the invitation to it flung out to you on every page of the New Testament? Is not Christ offered to you in all His offices? and are you not welcome to all His benefits if you want them? Is not the Holy Spirit promised to them that ask Him? Nothing can hinder you from being a Christian, but your own worldly, selfish, proud, obstinate, unworthy, and self- righteous heart."
"When a sinner has any just sense of his condition, as alienated from a holy God, he will not be apt to think of the unpardonable sin."
"When he abandoned all attempt to save himself, Jesus Christ saved him. This was all he knew about it. And more, this was all there was about it."
"Mrs. M., you seem to be very sick." " Yes," said she, "I am dying." "And are you ready to die?" "Sir, God knows I have taken Him at His word, and I am not afraid to die."
"A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for."
"The piecemeal criticism which, like the fly, scans only the edge of a plinth in the great edifice upon which it crawls, disappears under a criticism that is all-comprehending and all-surveying."
"There is just now a great clamor and demand for "culture;" but it is not so much culture that is needed as discipline."
"The law is obligated to punish the transgressor as much as the transgressor is obligated to obey the law — law has no option. Justice has but one function. The necessity of penalty is as great as the necessity of obligation. The law itself is under law; that is, it is under the necessity of its own nature; and therefore the only possible way whereby a transgressor can escape the penalty of the law, is for a substitute to endure it for him. The deep substrata and base of all God's ethical attributes are eternal law and impartial justice."
"Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?"
"As human voice and instrument blend in one harmony, as human soul and body blend in each act of feeling, thought, or speech, so, as far as we can know, divinity and humanity act together in the thought and heart and act of the one Christ."
"People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People's presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions."
"The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic world view of the scientists."
"History indicates that at a certain point of economic breakdown people cease being concerned with individual liberties and are ready to accept regimentation. The danger is obviously even greater when the two main values so many people have are personal peace and affluence."
"Now, not all the founding fathers were individually, personally, Christians. That certainly is true. But, nevertheless, they founded the country on the base that there is a God who is the Creator (now I come to the next central phrase) who gave the inalienable rights."
"We must understand something very thoroughly. If society — if the state gives the rights, it can take them away — they're not inalienable. If the states give the rights, they can change them and manipulate them. But this was not the view of the founding fathers of this country. They believed, although not all of them were individual Christians, that there was a Creator and that this Creator gave the inalienable rights — this upon which our country was founded and which has given us the freedoms which we still have — even the freedoms which are being used now to destroy the freedoms."
"The reason that these freedoms were there is because they believed there was somebody who gave the inalienable rights. But if we have the view that the final reality is material or energy which has existed forever in some form, we must understand that this view never, never, never would have given the rights which we now know and which, unhappily, I say to you (those of you who are Christians) that too often you take all too much for granted."
"Cambridge historians who aren't Christians would tell you that if it wasn't for the Wesley revival and the social change that Wesley's revival had brought, England would have had its own form of the French Revolution. It was Wesley saying people must be treated correctly and dealing down into the social needs of the day that made it possible for England to have its bloodless revolution in contrast to France's bloody revolution."
"His death there on Calvary's cross is for us individually, but it's not egotistically individualistic. Our individual salvation will one day be a portion of the restoration of all things. It is our calling until He comes back again that happy day, to do all we can — while it won't be perfect as when He comes back — to see substantial healing in every area that He will then perfectly heal, and that Wesley did understand."
"We can show the way. We can make dust -- or eat dust."
"To be a successful state, we have to nurture successful children."
"Going to church on Sunday does not make you a Christian any more than going into a garage makes you an automobile!"
"Going to church don’t make anybody a Christian Any more than taking a wheelbarrow into a garage make it an automobile."
"I have no interest in a God who does not smite."
"The saloon is a liar. It promises good cheer and sends sorrow."
"I recollect about 20 years since that a number of Quaker friends were sent to Winchester by Government, for some cause which I never understood so well, not being in the Legislature, but in a Department, the employment of which afforded little time to enquire into the propriety or impropriety of your Banishment — but I well recolect you among others of the unfortunate — am sorry to observe that such misfortunes Generally take place on revolutions, and often very unjustly."
"I believe in one God, the first and great cause of all goodness. I also believe in Jesus Christ the redeemer of the world. I also believe in the Holy gost the comforter— here perhaps we may Differ a little as I believe Jesus Christ was from eternity and a part of the godhead — was Detached by the Father to Do a certain piece of service whioh was to take on Human Nature, which Human Nature was to suffer Death for the redemption of Mankind and when that service was compleatly fulfilled that he returned to and was consolidated with the Godhead. I further believe that all that are saved must be saved through the merits of Christ. I believe the Holy gost to be a part of the Divinity of the Father & son coequal with both is left here to comfort all that Hunger & thirst after righteousness a spark of which inhabit the breast of mankind as a monitor. These are apart of my ideas on the subject of religion."
"As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life, and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived — a Defensive war I think a righteous war to Defend my life & property & that of my family, in my own opinion, is right & justifiable in the sight of God. An offensive war, I believe to be wrong and would therefore have nothing to do with it, having no right to meddle with another man's property, his ox or his ass, his man servant or his maid servant or anything that is his. Neither does he have a right to meddle with anything that is mine, if he does I have a right to defend it by force."
"This untutored son of the frontier was the only general in the American Revolution, on either side, to produce a significant original tactical thought."
"Seldom has a battle, in which greater numbers were not engaged, been so important in its consequences as that of Cowpens."
"No doctrine can be a proper object of our faith which it is not more reasonable to believe than to reject. […] In receiving therefore the most mysterious doctrines of revelation, the ultimate appeal is to reason: not to determine whether she could have discovered these truths; not to declare whether considered in themselves they appear probable; but to decide whether it is not more reasonable to believe what God speaks, than to confide in our own crude and feeble conceptions."
"There is no just cause for apprehending that we shall be misled by the proper exercise of reason on any subject which may be proposed for our consideration. The only danger is of making an improper use of this faculty, which is one of the most common faults to which our nature is liable. Most men profess that they are guided by reason in forming their opinions; but if this were really the case, the world would not be overrun with error; there would not be so many dangerous and absurd opinions propagated and pertinaciously defended."
"We lay it down as a first principle—from which we can no more depart than from the consciousness of existence—that MAN IS FREE; and therefore stand ready to embrace whatever is fairly included in the definition of freedom."
"All my theology is reduced to this narrow compass, JESUS CHRIST came into the world to save sinners."
"At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting. Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible — and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness; for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense, for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be — or why should it be written or read? — and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther? But the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape — he gives it proper size. For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both."
"Scholars are still in search of the exact meaning of certain speeches in each of Shakespeare’s great tragedies — and we should like to assume that those who saw these plays for the first time did not have perfect understanding of all of the lines — but so great was Shakespeare’s power to conceive of action from which thought and feeling can be readily inferred that all of us know Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth more intimately than we know many men whose remarks we understand perfectly."
"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."
"As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.""
"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."
"Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana."
"The brain gives up a lot less easily than the body."
"Help," he said "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly."
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash."
"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."
"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."
"Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story — and maybe something of a poem. Anyway, as you possibly remember, there are these lines in front of the story:"
""From the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains," Captain Lewis said in his journals. Its singular appearance makes it a fitting backdrop for early and everlasting drama in which nature plays the leading role."
"In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them."
"Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts — hopefully, even the arch to the sky."
"A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help."
"It shouldn't be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn't understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, "We thought he must have gone nuts." A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him."
"This was Norman’s remarkable ability — to imagine how highly sophisticated philosophical and critical ideas continually relate to our everyday life. This remarkable synthesis of the intellectual and the practical pervades his writing, transforming the experiences he had in the midst of western mountains and rivers into paradigms of human life and thus accomplishing the ultimate goal of fiction."
"There is not a writer in the world who will not jump with the shock of recognition when Maclean discerns iambic pentameter in the business of the whorehouse, a second epiphany when everything heard sorted itself into rhythms. … Here Maclean, at seventeen, becomes conscious of the shape of language, the way it falls on the ear. In that whorehouse, ill, dazed, and swimming in and out of consciousness, he became the writer who bloomed fifty-odd years later."
"This bill is called the Hate Crimes bill. The first major reason to vote no is because this bill increases hatred in America. I will say it again. This bill increases hatred in America. [...] It creates animosity by elevating one group over another group, and thus creates hatred. This is counter to everything American law has ever stood for, and it will increase hatred in America, and for that reason alone, it should be voted no."
"And yet we have terrorists in our own culture called abortionists."
"You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other law-breaking: not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things, misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die. All of these things are common practice, and all of that information is available for America."
"Now, Social Security through the years, for many many people, has been a terrible investment. It's really a tax, that's all it is. Social Security is a tax."
"At the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God and a belief that government should replace God."
"[Asked about abortions for rape victims] It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child."
"To keep shooting at a folly after it is dead is unsportsmanlike."
"We sometimes speak of stubborn facts. Nonsense! A fact is a mere babe when compared with a stubborn theory."
"There is no absurdity in its mental processes; all that is concealed in its assumptions."
"Creative spirits always anticipate the course of events. They do not wait for the dawn of a new era. They resolutely begin the new era at the moment when they see that the old era is ended. The darkness gathers, but it is a time, not for vain repining over that which has passed away, but for eager planning for that which must take its place. There is a quick transfer of interests to new problems which relate themselves to the new period."
"History is an endless maze of unrelated happenings, until we divide it up into brief portions in which we discern a certain unity of purpose."
"In the meantime, the real America had awakened, but in its own way. It had awakened, not as a neurasthenic awakes to a vague and benumbing sense of helplessness in the presence of disaster, but as a strong man awakes to the magnitude of his necessary work."
"Comparative anatomy, therefore, proves that man is naturally a frugivorous animal, formed to subsist upon fruits, seeds, and farinaceous vegetables."
"Brethren, our preaching will bear its legitimate fruits. If immorality prevails in the land, the fault is ours in a great degree. If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discrimination, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in religion, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it. Let us not ignore this fact, my dear brethren; but let us lay it to heart, and be thoroughly awake to our responsibility in respect to the morals of this nation. - The Decay of Conscience"
"Whenever (a Christian) sins, he must, for the time being, cease to be holy. This is self-evident. Whenever he sins, he must be condemned; he must incur the penalty of the law of God ... If it be said that the precept is still binding upon him, but that with respect to the Christian, the penalty is forever set aside, or abrogated, I reply, that to abrogate the penalty is to repeal the precept, for a precept without penalty is no law. It is only counsel or advice. The Christian, therefore, is justified no longer than he obeys, and must be condemned when he disobeys or Antinomianism is true ... In these respects, then, the sinning Christian and the unconverted sinner are upon precisely the same ground."
"Repentance ... implies a conviction, that God is wholly right, and the sinner wholly wrong, and a thorough and hearty abandonment of all excuses and apologies for sin. It implies an entire and universal acquittal of God from every shade and degree of blame, a thorough taking of the entire blame of sin to self. It implies a deep and thorough abasement of self in the dust, a crying out of soul against self, and a most sincere and universal, intellectual, and hearty exaltation of God."
"Self-loathing is a natural and a necessary consequence of those intellectual views of self that are implied in repentance."
"Impenitence is a phenomenon of the will, and consists in the will's cleaving to self-indulgence under light. It consists in the will's pertinacious adherence to the gratification of self, in despite of all the light with which the sinner is surrounded. It is not, as has been said, a passive state nor a mere negation, nor the love of sin for its own sake; but it is an active and obstinate state of the will, a determined holding on to that course of self-seeking which constitutes sin, not from a love to sin, but for the sake of the gratification."
"When the claims of God are revealed to the mind, it must necessarily yield to them, or strengthen itself in sin. It must, as it were, gird itself up, and struggle to resist the claims of duty. This strengthening self in sin under light is the particular form of sin which we call impenitence."
"I consider this Negro [Benjamin Banneker] as fresh proof that the powers of the mind are disconnected with the colour of the skin or in other words, a striking contradiction to Mr. Hume's doctrine that "the Negroes are naturally inferior to the whites and unsusceptible of attainments in arts and sciences."
"President Obama says that conservatives hate women, that there’s a war on women, and that the only thing that women care about is birth control. Oh, Mr. President bless your heart. Which man in your administration came up with that one? Women aren’t a cheap date. Women want a little more out of life than contraceptives. Just the other day I got a call from a friend back home. She’s 64-years-old. She told me her insurance company contacted her to say that under Obamacare they would pay for contraceptives but not for her blood pressure medication. She told them to put it in writing so she could share it with her congressman.What women want is not free contraceptives. We want opportunity. We want all the potential of the American economy unlocked for us. We want the government to stay out of our way … stay out of our wallets... and stay out of our emails. We want to have choice. Not the type of choice that men in the Democratic Party talk about, but real choice."
"If a President can enforce a part of a law and delay a part of a law, then does he have a power to not enforce any law he so chooses? If he can allow illegal aliens to freely run across our border, can he force legal citizens out of the country? Where would be the end of his power? We are a nation of laws with respect and recognition of the rule of law. We are not an imperialist government with a monarch abiding by the rule of one man."
"[W]hen the White House refused to speak directly and clearly about this matter, we were weakened as a nation and a tyrant was strengthened... The dodge on Putin broke with the basic American moral tradition. It broke faith with our core values. It broke trust with freedom seekers across the globe... To those who struggle, we have always said, ‘we see you, and we stand with you.’ These simple truths matter. The moral responsibilities of the office of the presidency matter, and when we don't affirm these basic truths, it is a failure to who we are. It is a failure to do what we do, and it is a betrayal, not just to the millions of people who are denied free and fair elections in Russia this week, but it is a failure to people all across the globe who are struggling in darkness against tyrants."
"Unconstitutional slop"
"... Republican bloodbath in the Senate"
"Wild press conferences erode public trust. So no, obviously Rudy and his buddies should not pressure electors to ignore their certification obligations under the statute. We are a nation of laws, not tweets."
"[W]e have, in many ways, the worst political class in our country's history."
"I'd like to live in a world in which happily married gay people have closets full of assault weapons to protect their pot."
"[R]iots aren't peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it's threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn't actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn't stop because I'd fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would."
"[D]rivers who feel their lives are in danger from a violent mob should not stop their vehicles. I remember Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was beaten nearly to death by a mob during the 1992 Los Angeles riots... I have always supported peaceful protests, speaking out against police militarization and excessive police violence."
"A socialist is someone who wants politicians to decide who gets what; a "democratic socialist" wants the politicians to at least stand for election first."
"[S]ocialism does have a siren call — essentially, the promise that if you vote for socialists, they’ll take stuff away from other people and give it to you. Since many people would rather have free stuff given to them in the name of “fairness” than have to work to get their own stuff, it’s never hard to round up votes with that approach. As the saying goes, a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can count on getting Paul’s vote."
"[T]he history of the 20th century was basically that of the swath of destruction left across the globe by socialist ideas, from the international socialism of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union to the national socialism of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party."
"Want real socialism? Look at Venezuela, an oil-exporting nation that is now dead broke even as the family of its socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez, reportedly somehow inherited billions at his death in 2013. Redistribution of wealth often seems to involve redistributing most of it to the people on top of the socialist pyramid."
"Given the failure of the two party establishments, it’s not entirely surprising that young people are looking elsewhere. Their votes are up for grabs, for those who are willing and able to offer something different. For the sake of the country, let’s hope those votes are won by people who are able to offer something different, and constructive, at the same time."
"Think of the press as a psychological warfare operation aimed at normal Americans and you won’t go far wrong."
"With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor."
"We cannot return to normal. Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting , expanding social welfare programs, ensuring access to water and sanitation, cash assistance to poor and low income families, good jobs, s and an annual income and protecting our democracy. It means ensuring that our abundant s are used for the general welfare, instead of war, walls, and the wealthy."
"Before COVID-19, nearly 700 people died everyday because of poverty and inequality in this country. The frontlines of this pandemic will be the poor and dispossessed - those who do not have access to healthcare, housing, water, decent wages, stable work or - and those who are continuing to work in this crisis, meeting our health care and other needs."
"It should not have taken a pandemic to raise these resources. In June 2019, we presented a Poor People’s Moral Budget to the House Budget Committee, showing that we can meet these needs for this entire country. If you had taken up this Moral Budget, we would have already moved towards infusing more than $1.2 trillion into the economy to invest in health care, good jobs, living wages, housing, water and sanitation services and more."
"This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. We know that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to this immediate crisis and the longer term illnesses we have been battling for months, years and decades before. We will continue to organize and build power until you meet these demands. Many millions of us have been hurting for far too long. We will not be silent anymore."
"[Here] we have the problem of Latin America. It is the problem of a bad start – religiously, politically, economically, and socially. We may add further that the Spanish Inquisition had the effect of developing a hard, ruthless character, and that this was reflected in Spain‘s treatment of her colonies. The Inquisition sanctified cruelty in the service of the Church."
"I am a Chinese American actor and there was nothing for me, and how can you take that slap in the face back and forth each year? Being from Minnesota, I’m a fighter, you know. I was an artist and wanted something more because it’s a lifetime of work. You just don’t want to get a paycheck to become a cliché person."
"If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused."
"He taught us how to live, and finally he taught us how to die."
"In 1980 the Democrats were pretty much stuck with Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, who ran under the slogan "Four More Years?" The Republicans, meanwhile, had a spirited primary campaign season, which came down to a duel between Reagan and George Herbert Walker Norris Wainright Armoire Vestibule Pomegranate Bush IV, who had achieved a distinguished record of public service despite having a voice that sounded like he had just inhaled an entire blimp-load of helium."
"One’s “authentic self” does not consist in the sum total of one’s biological urges (especially those oriented toward what God expressly forbids) but rather in one’s conformity to the image of Jesus Christ, which includes taking up one’s cross, denying oneself, losing one’s life, and following him."
"In the months of August and September of the year 1899 occurred, about three days from Luebo, one of the most shameful affairs that has come within my knowledge. By way of explanation it is necessary to say that at the State post of Luluaburg, which is about five days march from Luebo, is located a large village of people called Zappo-Zapps. They are cannibals, and were brought from far to the east, and settled there by a State officer named Paul Le Marinel about the year 1890. Ever since their coming to Luluaburg they have been a terror to the whole surrounding district. In fact, having guns and being known to be cannibals and very brave warriors, they have all these years been the great slave-dealers and slave-raiders of the district."
"During the last days of July, 1899 (or about that time), news reached us at Luebo that a large band of Zappo-Zapps, under a famous warrior chief named Mlumba Nkusa, was proceeding into the Bena Pianga country, not far from one of our Mission stations, in order to collect tribute and get stores for the State. Upon hearing this news I wrote at once to our missionary at Ibanj, the Rev. W. H. Sheppard, F.R.G.S., warning him to be on the look-out for trouble. He had not long to wait, for soon the news began to come in from the region only one day from the station that the Zappo-Zapps had established themselves in a strong stockade near a village named Chinyama, from which they were almost daily sallying forth to catch slaves, demand tribute from villagers, and kill all who dared oppose them. This condition of affairs went on uninterrupted by the officer at Luluaburg, though only four—or at the most five—days distant. The greatest terror prevailed throughout the whole region, extending even as far as Luebo and beyond. Many thousands of people had deserted their villages and fled to the forests for safety."
"At last word came to Mr. Sheppard that the Zappo-Zapps had treacherously invited a large number of the prominent chiefs of the region to come inside the stockade, and that there they had been shot down without 1294quarter. The mission than asked Mr. Sheppard, who was also a friend of many of the Zappo-Zapps, to go and carefully investigate the whole affair, taking with him some reliable native men, who could, if necessary, corroborate the statements he made."
"Mr. Sheppard saw along the way several burnt vilages, also some wounded persons. He reached the well-arranged stockade, and was received in a friendly way by Mlumba Nkusa and his 500 or more followers. Inside the stockade Mr. Sheppard saw and counted eighty-one human hands slowly drying over a fire."
"Unless there is freedom of religion it is useless to speak of any other form of freedom."
"For 50 years, women have relied on their constitutional right to make their own medical decisions, but today that right has been tragically ripped away. That means it’s now up to the states to determine whether women get reproductive health care, and in North Carolina they still can. I will continue to trust women to make their own medical decisions as we fight to keep politicians out of the doctor’s exam room."
"Aspiring to be President of the United States, televangelist Pat Robertson preaches, "The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening." If any statement is more anti-American and more contrary to the Christian gospel, I have yet to hear it."
"Hear a statement by the founder of the Moral Majority, and now a new movement, the so-called Liberty Movement, the Reverend Mr. Jerry Falwell, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country." People, the very foundation and fabric of our nation is really being threatened more by these popular religious voices, mesmerizing millions by way of television, than any threat of communism has ever presented us."
"This is your Mother Earth speaking today on behalf of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood-sisterhood of our common family. I am speaking to you Christian Americans in particular. You along with other citizens are raping me. There is not one among you who is altogether innocent, no not one. You have become so accustomed to abusing me for profit, jobs, luxuries, conveniences, and pleasures that it has become a natural way of life for you. It isn't that you intend to be malicious; it is only that you are thoughtless. But thoughtlessness doesn't clear you in a court of justice."
"The ruination of your environment respects no human-drawn borders nor any family's fenced in private property ... All of you, my citizens, are very interdependent. Each must learn to care for all, and all must learn to care for each. Not to love your neighbor as yourself is to surely perish."
"Unless you allow the world of nature to flourish, you will perish."
"You Christians ought to be most highly motivated to practice environmental stewardship. If you are accountable to God for every idle word you speak, do you think you are going to be held any less accountable for everything you waste and all that depletes God's good creation?"
"You Christians are called upon to balance your quest for personal salvation with reverence for nature. Either you live for the common good of all, or you live for no good or God at all!"
"And who is it that always suffers from the affluent people's overkill and superfluity but the poor again. You are making a wider and wider gap on the earth between the rich and the poor. And that is always a far greater threat to our national and international security than any nuclear arms race."
"You and I are destroying God's good earth that sustains us - biting the hand that feeds us. We are fighting God's natural systems in our determination to keep increasing our gross national product. In order to be comfortable, make as much money as we can, have it as easy as possible, and enjoy more pleasures now, we are leaving our children's children a wilderness that will not sustain them."
"Crises get our attention, but only love for God and his earth will hold our attention and move us to saving action."
"Would God be concerned with saving a soul, only to have that reborn person live in an impoverished and unhealthy environment? Salvation is a word that means "wholeness." Christ claimed that he came so that everyone might have life more abundantly. Christ's salvation includes the wholeness of the creature and the creation."
"Secular environmentalists have grounds to blame the Christian forces for the idea of life that will be good after death that they have ignored the consequences of people's irresponsibility with earth."
"Until we Christians see that the Gospel's good news of redemption applies to the earth, as well as the earthling, we will proliferate the sin of raping God's good earth. God's work of redemption in Jesus Christ encompasses the whole of creation and provides the grounds for restoring the brokenness in the relationship of humankind to creation, and the relationship of both to God."
"We must reclaim a sense of reverence for the earth and a recognition of our essential relatedness to the earth."
"Only love for God and God's good earth will keep our attention and move us to commitment. Nature is rising up to judge us Nature is striking back to call us to repentance."
"Healing and saving the creation is God's work, and he calls faithful persons to be co-creators with him."
"Mr. Truman excised the best of the Good Neighbor policy when he sent the very first civil rights message to the Congress of the United States and desegregated the Armed Forces. Folks, I think on this day in honoring Mr. Truman with that civil rights move, we need to all acknowledge the fact that we do have our prejudices, systemic prejudices, within each one of us. When we will honestly acknowledge those prejudices that we have, when we're in touch with those feelings, then it is that we can begin to discipline ourselves to love our neighbors with different pigments, and cultures, and races, and yes economics."
"If we love God, we can't help but love our neighbors because we're going to respect them as our brothers and sisters. In fact, folks, if you stop to think about it, the only way in this world any of us has of loving God is by loving our neighbors."
"The deepest religious concern on this earth today is being a good neighbor. The most crucial political issue in the world today is learning how to do rightly neighbor-with-neighbor. The greatest social urgency is learning how to be a good neighbor to one another. And certainly the most crucial concern of our global economy, call it economic justice, is caring about our neighbors simply the same way we care about ourselves."
"Now if the greatest single power in a democratic republic is the power of a single vote, then the greatest power any human being has on this earth is love. Love for God. Certainly, love for self. And love for our neighbor. And when I talk of love today, I'm not talking of that simple, sentimental, otherworldly, ethereal kind of love. I'm thinking of a kind of love with which God loves every last one of us. It's the kind of love that transforms the human personality. It addresses the will. And it molds the human mind. And the love of which I speak today actually instills holy habits even in the least of us."
"Now honest down-to-earth tough love is the only virtue that I know of that's guaranteed never to fail. We often fail loving, but love never fails."
"Good neighborliness is really the common denominator by which we can all live together in harmony in a world of difference. Love is the only thing that tears down those walls that tend to separate us neighbor from neighbor, and bridges all the gaps between religions, races, cultures, and economies."
"The wonder of spontaneous, tough-hearted, uncalculated, discipline, and unexpected love, that's living. True kindness never stops for one moment to calculate the cost of time, of money, of inconvenience, or even danger, but jumps to the aid of a neighbor, even an enemy. Love for neighbor is ever ready. And once we get it going, it keeps going and going and going."
"You know, if you and I would really want to make a real difference in this world today, to make a real difference for God and good, all we need to do is to learn how, and to begin to discipline ourselves, to treat our neighbors just the way we treat ourselves, would want to be treated. It's that simple and it's that difficult."
"They stopped next at a bookstore. "Oh, what a delicious smell of new books!" said Ellen, as they entered. "Mamma, if it wasn't for one thing, I should say I never was so happy in my life.""
"My dear little daughter," said he, "you cannot be so glad to come back as my arms and my heart will be to receive you."
"... the pony was not forgetful, yet ever and anon a touch of his owner's whip came to remind him, and the fellow's little body fairly wriggled from side to side in his efforts to get on. "I wish you wouldn't whip him so!" said Daisy, "he's doing as well as he can." "What do girls know about driving!" was the retort from the small piece of masculine science beside her."
"This, as I understand it, is the orthodox doctrine of native depravity. They do not hold, (as some have reported,) that there is a mass of corrupt matter lodged in the heart, which sends off noxious exhalations like a dead body. But they maintain that the soul has entirely lost the image of God, in which it was originally created; that there is nothing pure or good remaining in it; that, in consequence of the withdrawment of those special, divine influences, which were given to our first parents, the proper balance of the powers is destroyed, they have lost their conformity to the law of God, and the holy dispositions, which were at first implanted in the soul, have given place to sinful dispositions, which are the source of all actual transgressions."
"Never before was a people so advantageously situated for working out this great problem in favor of human liberty."
"Give the the place in your families to which it is entitled, and then, through the unsearchable riches of Christ, many a household among you may hereafter realize that most blessed consummation, and appear !"
"In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively. The mail is delivered (sometimes); the population, or at least part of it, is counted (sort of); and taxes are collected (you bet). You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin."