Protestants from the United States

"Where is human nature so weak as in a book store?"

"A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life."

"Oh, tell me not that they are dead — that generous host, that airy army of invisible heroes. They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this nation. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society, and inspire the people with nobler motives, and more heroic patriotism? Ye that mourn, let gladness mingle with your tears. It was your son, but now he is the nation's. He made your household bright: now his example inspires a thousand households. Dear to his brothers and sisters, he is now brother to every generous youth in the land. Before, he was narrowed, appropriated, shut up to you. Now he is augmented, set free, and given to all. Before, he was yours: he is ours. He has died from the family, that he might live to the nation. Not one name shall be forgotten or neglected: and it shall by and by be confessed of our modern heroes, as it is of an ancient hero, that he did more for his country by his death than by his whole life."

"Humor is, however, nearer right than any emotion we have. Humor is the atmosphere in which grace most flourishes."

"Any law that takes hold of a man’s daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life."

"The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion. So the immigrants of all races and nations become Americans, and it is a disgrace to our institutions and a shame to our policy to abuse them or drive them away."

"...no emotion, any more than a wave, can long retain its own individual form."

"There are a great many doors open; but a door must be of a man's size or it is not meant for him."

"The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad."

"Evil men of every degree will use you, flatter you, lead you on until you are useless; then, if the virtuous do not pity you, or God compassionate, you are without a friend in the universe."

"Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments."

"Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad when they touch the ground, but grow narrower as they reach the sky."

"There are apartments in the soul which have a glorious out-look; from whose windows you can see across the river of death, and into the shining city beyond; but how often are these neglected for the lower ones, which have earthward-looking windows!"

"The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself."

"Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches in the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skilfully constructed, could do; nay, which brings to view even the throne of God, and pierces that nebulous distance where are those eternal verities in which true life consists."

"Raphael did well, and Phidias did well; but it is not painter or sculptor who is making himself most nobly immortal. It is he who is making true impressions upon the mind of man; frescoes for eternity, that will not shine out till the light of heaven reveals them; sculptures, not wrought in outward things, but in the inward nature and character of the soul."

"If any of you should die today, could you say to God, "Lord, here is my life work. Thou didst send me into life with a handful of seeds, and here is my heart, like a garden, full of flowers"?"

"A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he be alone, for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth."

"For four thousand years the strong had been rushing on in the road of privilege and power, seeking greatness. Christ stood in the path, and said, " Ye seek greatness. Ye are not even in the way to it. Ye are going up, but the way to greatness is down. Let him who would be great be the love-servant of all." Greatness consists in the facility and power of going down, and not in the facility of going up."

"Let it be understood that the end of our existence here is that we may be more God-like […] and that we are placed here to grow strong and noble, and not merely to enjoy."

"Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it only serves to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own."

"When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory."

"There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practise it while they hear."

"It is not well for a man to pray, cream; and live, skim milk."

"The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day."

"Doctrine is nothing but the skin of Truth set up and stuffed."

"Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone; he would have the same voyage to make, only his compass and chart would be overboard."

"Never forget what a man has said to you when he was angry."

"We expect old men to be conservative, but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung."

"Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into."

"[L]ove is more just than justice."

"[C]ompassion will cure more sins than condemnation."

"A man who has a mere factual nature; a man who perceives without much power of reflection; a man who sees only facts, cannot come to any such judgment of truths as the man, higher than he, who not only perceives facts, but has also, by his mental constitution, the power to reason upon them, and to deduce the generic from the specific — that is, the principle from the facts. If it be investigation into the nature of truth as it is contained in the Word of God, a man's moral disposition will color his beliefs. If one, for instance, be largely conscientious, and endowed with small benevolence, the nature of his mind will make him sensitive to those representations of Scripture which depict God as standing upon law; as maintaining righteousness; as being good and just, rather than benevolent and sympathetic. If, on the other hand, a man be himself kind and benevolent, and if he have little conscientiousness, then the elements of sympathy will predominate in the God that he depicts, and the elements which tend towards legality will be comparatively wanting in him. Evidence of justice and law will make but a small impression on such a man, while evidence of goodness will make a prodigious impression upon him."

"Now, evidence to a man is that which convinces his mind. It varies with different men. An argument to a man who cannot reason is no evidence. Facts are no evidence to a man who cannot perceive them. A sentimental appeal is evidence to a man whose very nature moves by emotion, though it may not be to his neighbor. So then, when men come to the investigation of truth, they are responsible, first, for research, for honesty therein, for being diligent, and for attempting to cleanse their minds from all bias of selfishness and pride. They are responsible for sincerity and faithfulness in the investigation of truth. And when they go beyond that to the use of their faculties, the combination of those faculties will determine very largely, not, perhaps, the generic nature of truth, but specific developments of it. And as long as the world stands there will be men who will hold that God is a God of infinite love and sympathy and. goodness with a residunm of justice; and there will be men who will believe that God is a God of justice with a residunm of love and sympathy and goodness; and each will follow the law of his own mind. As a magnet, drawn through a vessel containing sand and particles of iron, attracts the particles of iron but does not attract the sand; so the faculties of a man's mind appropriate certain facts and reject others. What is evidence to a man will depend upon those of his faculties whk at work upon the things which are presented as evidence."

"The Scriptures make the test of believing to lie in the life and in the disposition. They nowhere require men, as the condition of acceptance and salvation, to be technically and philosophically right on all points of belief; but they do require that a man, in the presence of truth, using it as he pleases, selecting it according to the analysis and attractions and repulsions of his own nature, should live right. They hold men accountable for the development of their manhood on the pattern of Christ Jesus. They say, "Here are the truths of God; sort them, use them, every man according to his own liberty, in the spirit, and not in the letter." You are called to liberty; but it is that every one of you may become men in Christ Jesus. Men are held accountable for manhood, but not for the way in which they use the instruments by which the manhood is produced."

"It is with the mind as it is with the body, in this respect. The physician says to a household: "Here is a great realm of food. Eat that which agrees with you. The same kinds of food do not agree with all people. If you grow healthy on the food that I loathe, that is the food for you, although it disagrees with me; and if I grow healthy on the food that you loathe, that is the food for me, although it disagrees with you." And it is very much so in the matter of believing. All cannot believe the same things, or cannot believe things in the same way. "But," say men, "believing amounts to nothing if one man may believe one thing, and another man another thing." Well, let me ask, then, is it not possible for truth to be so large that ten men shall believe it differently, and yet each one of them so sectionally believe it, that they shall be all true though none of them has more than partial truth, and that all of them shall compass the whole truth?"

"I look at a large tree on the lawn, and say to my neighbour: "What is that tree to you?" He looks at it, and says: "Well, I think that would cut about twenty cords of wood. You could work in a good many branches, and as the price of wood is in the market, I think I could make fifty dollars out of that tree easily, and perhaps more than that." His answer shows what the tree is to him — and it is that." I call up a boy, and say to him: "What do you think of when you look at that tree?" "Ah !" he says, "there will be a bushel of hickory-nuts on that tree, anyhow; and he begins to think how he will climb it, and shake them down, and what he will do with them. That is what the tree says to him. I say to another person: "What is that tree to you?" He says: "I would not take fifty dollars for it. Under it my cows stand in summer. The shade of that tree has stood me instead of a shed ever since I owned this farm. That tree is worth its weight in gold." He values it for its economic uses. I ask a painter: "What is that tree to you?" At once he says: "Do you see what an exquisite form it has? How picturesque it is? If you were to take it and put it in the foreground of the landscape that I am working on, what a magnificent effect you would get!" It has an aesthetic value to him. I ask another man: "What is it to you?" He goes into an explanation of its structure and qualities. He is a botanist, and he has his peculiar view of it. I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things ; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs ; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it. So it is with truths. Men sort them. They bring different faculties to bear in considering them. One person has philosophical reason; another has factual reason. One man brings one part of his mind to it ; another brings to it another part of his mind. The truth is larger than any one man's thought of it. The truth of God usually has relations that stretch out in such a way that men may see it very differently, and all of them be true in spots, although they do not have the whole truth."

""Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you." — John XV 15 This is unquestionably a contrast between an enforced and a free religious condition. It is a transfer from a life compelled by fear, through conscience, to a life that is inspired and made spontaneous by love. The strength of the phrase does not come out in that term servant. It is slave in the original. To be sure, the condition represented by the term slave was not at that time marked so sharply by the contrast of its misery with surrounding circumstances, as it is in our own day; nevertheless, it was a condition to be deprecated; and throughout the Scripture it is spoken of both as a misfortune and a disgrace. Our Savior looked upon his disciples as if they had, as Jews, and as worshipers after the manner of their fathers, been tied up in a kind of bondage. He was a member of the Jewish commonwealth, and was of the Jewish church; he had never separated himself from any of its ordinances or observances, but was walking as the fathers walked; and his disciples were bound not only to the Mosaic ritual, but to him as a kind of Rabbi; as a reform teacher, but nevertheless a teacher under the Jewish scheme. And so they were servants — slaves; they were rendering an enforced obedience. But he said to them, "Henceforth I shall not call you my servants — persons obeying me, as it were, from compulsion, from a sense of duty, from the stress of a rigorous conscience; I shall now call you friends." And he gives the reason why. A servant is one who receives orders, and is not admitted to conference. He does not know about his lord's affairs. His lord thinks first about his own affairs, and when he has consummated his plans, he gives his directions; so that all the servant has to do is to obey. But a friend sits in counsel with his friend, and bears a part in that friend's thinking and feeling, and in the determinations to which he comes; and Christ said to his disciples "You come into partnership with me hereafter, and you stand at friends, on a kind of equality with me. There is to be liberty between you and me hereafter." Christ, then, raised men from religion as a bondage to religion as a freedom. I do not like the word religion; but we have nothing else to take its place. It signifies, in the original, to bind, to tie. Men were bound. They were under obligations, and were tied up by them. Christianity is something more than religion— that is, religion interpreted in its etymological sense, and as it is popularly esteemed. Christianity is religion developed into its last form, and carries men from necessity to voluntariness — from bondage to emancipation. It is a condition of the highest and most normal mental state, and is ordinarily spontaneous and free. This is not an accidental phrase."

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his picture."

"The one great poem of New England is her Sunday."

"All words are pegs to hang ideas upon."

"Everyman is full of music, but it is not everyman that knows how to bring it out."

"Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or cart."

"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but, if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that."

"Caution and conservatism are expected of old age; but when the young men of a nation are possessed of such a spirit, when they are afraid of the noise and strife caused by the new applications of the truth, Heaven save the land! Its funeral bell has already rung."

"The Bible is God's chart for you to steer by, to keep you from the bottom of the sea, and to show you where the harbor is, and how to reach it without running on rocks or bars."

"There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive."

"If Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God in the experience of those who trust and love Him, there needs no further argument of His divinity."

"Like the cellar-growing vine is the Christian who lives in the darkness and bondage of fear. But let him go forth, with the liberty of God, into the light of love, and he will be like the plant in the field, healthy, robust, and joyful."

"Difficulties are God's errands; and when we are sent upon them, we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence, — as a compliment from God."

"Christ is the ideal of what a man should be. He has my ideal portrait, as it were, drawn out in His own thought and feeling. There is an exaltation and a grandeur for myself in the time to come, which Christ knows, and I do not; but I am following after. I am pressing up toward that thought that Christ has of what I am and ought to be; and I am determined that I will apprehend it as Christ Himself does. Not that I have it; but I will strive for it. My manhood is in the future. My life lies beyond the present."

"Live for the other life. Endure as seeing Him who is invisible. Work by faith; work by hope; work by love; work by courage; work by trust; work by the sweet side of your mind; and so be like Christ, until you dwell with Him."

"Whoever lives a noble life for Christ and God — he is one of God's workmen, working on that building of which God is the supreme Architect."

"It is not to come in any particular way, or with any particular experience, but to arise and come to your Father, and say unto Him, "Father I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son; make me as one of Thy hired servants.""

"Thou, Everlasting Strength, hast set Thyself forth to bear our burdens. May we bear Thy cross, and bearing that, find there is nothing else to bear; and touching that cross, find that instead of taking away our strength, it adds thereto. Give us faith for darkness, for trouble, for sorrow, for bereavement, for disappointment; give us a faith that will abide though the earth itself should pass away — a faith for living, a faith for tying."

"We would walk with Thee when Thou smitest us, and we would walk with Thee when Thou smilest upon us; for, smiling or smiting, it is in love. We take chastisement because we are sons, and Thou art Father. O grant that we may never feel Thy hand as Judge! Restrain us with Thy love. Wean us from our sin, and from the love of it, and bring us back to Thine own self."

"And now we beseech of Thee that we may have every day some such sense of God's mercy and of the power of God about us, as we have of the fullness of the light of heaven before us."

"May we grow more and more like God and heaven, more gracious, helpful, and sweet-minded; and when at last Thou hast served Thyself by us, may we fall asleep in Jesus, and find it no sleep, but everlasting waking in Jesus."

"Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them."

"When, O crowned Jesus; when, O loving Saviour; when, O patient and just Judge — when wilt Thou come forth from Thy hiding, and change tears to smiles, and groans to joys? When shall that choral song burst forth, sweeping through the air, and circling about Thy throne, which shall proclaim the redemption of the world to the Lord God?"

"The whole of the Saviour's ministerial life, at least the part of it that stands on record, was passed in what we may call substantially a revival work."

"A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah! what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life."

"Success is full of promise till men get it; and then it is last year's nest from which the bird has flown."

"May we feel after Thee; still calling out in the darkness, as children waking in the night call "Father," so may we call out for God; and, at times, even if we do not hear Thy voice, may there be the form of a hand resting upon us, and that shall be enough; for we shall take hold of it, though it be in the dark, and it shall guide us to the growing light; for the day shall come, and the release and triumph."

"It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother."

""Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones"."

"Fisk had the tradition of her Jubilee Singers, who once hid in a Brooklyn organ loft, lest pious Congregationalists see their black faces before they heard their heavenly voices. Henry Ward Beecher took them to Plymouth church where the newspaper called them "Beecher's Nigger Minstrels"; then the nation listened and the world opened its arms and the Fisk Jubilee Singers literally sang before Kings."

"Henry Ward Beecher was right: "Nature is God's tongue.""

"I can but hope, comparing such an audience as this with the handful who met with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in the first Convention, in a little Wesleyan church at Seneca Falls, and seeing Henry Ward Beecher for the first time on our platform, and speaking such noble words for woman, I can but hope that it will not be as our friend Frances D. Gage expressed her fear it would, that the degradation which centuries had created among us, would require centuries to remove;"

"I met the great preacher Henry Ward Beecher, whom my father, then a member of a lecture committee of the Y.M.C.A., brought to Bridgeton. Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, had been a leader in the anti-slavery struggle before the Civil War, and had remained a leader in all progressive movements of the time. At that time Henry Ward Beecher was in the midst of a lawsuit brought against him in 1875 by a man named Tilton, a former friend who accused him of intimacy with his wife. It was a tremendous scandal, and everyone took sides, Old-time friends of Henry Ward Beecher fought for him valiantly. Those who did not know him, especially in such small towns as ours, were violently against him. So it took courage on the part of my father to bring him to the Bridgeton Y.M.C.A. I was allowed to go to his lecture, although I was so young. I have no clear memory of his words, but I can remember how impressed I was by his magnetic personality, his distinguished bearing, his fresh healthy color and white hair, and his ringing voice. At our house after the lecture, I remember asking him whether he prepared his lectures beforehand, and if he wrote them out. "No, my child," he told me. "I sometimes have no idea at all what I am going to say until I look over my audience, and then I draw my inspiration from them. Other times I prepare a lecture in my mind beforehand, carefully working out points one, two and three and then something I see in my audience will change my whole train of thought, and I will make an entirely different speech from the one I had in mind." I have often remembered this, and later when I began to speak myself, I too found that my greatest inspiration always came from the people to whom I was talking."

"The ballot is a teacher. Henry Ward Beecher, in a discourse on the subject last winter, said, in regard to woman's franchise, that the ballot is a teacher. I am glad to be able to agree with a minister, which is not often the case. Yes, it is a teacher. Yet, when a man alone has the ballot, it fails to be his teacher. It has not taught him the great lesson that the ballot is useless, that it becomes perverted and corrupt, when woman is kept from it."

"The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier¹5 and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade."

"It was here in Liverpool, by the way, where Henry Ward Beecher was mobbed when he tried to speak on anti-slavery subjects in the '40's…The feeling which developed in Liverpool during the American Civil War, was shared in large measure and for the same reason (the injury to the cotton trade) by the people of Manchester. In this city also Rev. Henry Ward Beecher fought one of his hard-won battles on the lecture platform with the mob of pro-slavery and secession sympathizers. But that is all past. The freedom of her public halls, churches, platforms and the press is cheerfully granted to those who speak for justice and fair play to the oppressed."

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

"But the sense of humour remains healthy only when it deals with immediate issues and faces the obvious and surface irrationalities. It must move toward faith or sink into despair when the ultimate issues are raised. That is why there is laughter in the vestibule of the temple, the echo of laughter in the temple itself, but only faith and prayer, and no laughter, in the holy of holies."

"The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men."

"This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor."

"The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished."

"Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own."

"Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others."

"The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends."

"While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves."

"Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life. Reason may extend and stabilise, but it does not create, the capacity to affirm other life than his own."

"The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power."

"The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself."

"The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks."

"The hope that the internal enemies will all be destroyed and that the new society will create only men who will be in perfect accord with the collective will of society, and will not seek personal advantage in the social process, is romantic in its interpretation of the possibilities of human nature and in its mystical glorification of the anticipated automatic mutuality in the communist society. ...In all these prophecies pure sentimentality obscures the fact that there can never be a perfect mutuality of interest between individuals who perform different functions in society... Man will always be imaginative enough to enlarge his needs beyond minimum requirements and selfish enough to feel the pressure of his needs more than the needs of others. Every society will have to maintain methods of arbitrating conflicting needs to the end of history; and in that process those who are shrewder will gain some advantage over the simple, even if they should lack special instruments of power."

"Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses."

"The extension of human sympathies [toward ever-larger communities] has... resulted in the creation of larger units of conflict without abolishing conflict. So civilization has become a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities."

"All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion."

"The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command."

"The naïve faith of the proletarian is the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers. There is of course an element of illusion in the faith of the proletarian, as there is in all faith. But it is a necessary illusion, without which some truth is obscured. The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case."

"A Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")"

"In the simple and decadent individualism of the Oxford group movement there is no understanding of the fact that the man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ. "All power," said Lord Acton with cynical realism, "corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If the man of power were to take a message of absolute honesty and absolute love seriously he would lose his power, or would divest himself of it. This is not to imply that the world can get along without power and that it is not preferable that men of conscience should wield it rather than scoundrels. But if men of power had not only conscience but also something of the gospel's insight into the intricacies of social sin in the world, they would know that they could never extricate themselves completely from the sinfulness of power, even while they were wielding it ostensibly for the common good. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")"

"The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and expressing itself in the guise of religion. No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer homes to its message! (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")"

"An irrevocable defeat of a socio-historical cause which gives meaning to the life of the individual must create a complete sense of meaninglessness unless the individual is sustained by a religion which interprets such defeats from the aspect of the eternal."

"The final sin of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner. The significant contribution of modern culture to this perennial human inclination lies in the number of plausible reasons which it was able to adduce in support of man's good opinion of himself."

"There is no level of moral achievement upon which man can have or actually has an easy conscience."

"Man does not know himself truly except as he knows himself confronted by God. Only in that confrontation does he become aware of his full stature and freedom and of the evil in him."

"Human existence is obviously distinguished from animal life by its qualified participation in creation. Within limits it breaks the forms of nature and creates new configurations of vitality. Its transcendence over natural process offers it the opportunity of interfering with the established forms and unities of vitality as nature knows them."

"The modern man is . . . certain about his essential virtue . . . [and since] he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcends both nature and reason . . . [he] is unable to understand the real pathos of his defiance of nature's and reason's laws. He always imagines himself betrayed into this defiance either by some accidental corruption in his past history or by some sloth of reason. Hence he hopes for redemption, either through a program of social reorganization or by some scheme of education."

"The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual."

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, Trusting that You will make all things right, If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen."

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

"Man is the kind of animal who cannot merely live. If he lives at all, he is bound to seek the realization of his true nature; and to his true nature belongs his fulfilment in the lives of others. The will to live is thus transmuted into the will to self-realization; and self-realization involves self-giving in relation to others. When this desire for self-realization is fully explored, it becomes apparent that it is subject to the paradox that the highest form of self-realization is the consequence of self-giving, but that it cannot be the intended consequence without being prematurely limited. Thus the will to live is finally transmuted into its opposite in the sense that only in self-giving can the self be fulfilled, for: “he that findeth his life shall lose it and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Reinhold Niebuhr The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness 1945 p. 20-21"

"The fact that the prevailing mood of modern culture was able to transmute the original pessimism of romanticism into an optimistic creed proves the power of this mood. Only occasionally the original pessimism erupts in full vigor, as in the thought of a Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. The subjugation of romantic pessimism, together with the transmutation of Marxist establishes historical optimism far beyond the confines of modern rationalism. Though there are minor dissonances the whole chorus of modern culture learned to sing the new song of hope in remarkable harmony. The redemption of mankind, by whatever means, was assured for the future. It was, in fact, assured by the future."

"There were experiences in previous centuries which might well have challenged this unqualified optimism. But the expansion of man's power over nature proceeded at such a pace that all doubts were quieted, allowing the nineteenth century to become the “century of hope” and to express the modern mood in its most extravagant terms. History, refusing to move by the calendar, actually permitted the nineteenth century to indulge its illusions into the twentieth. Then came the deluge. Since 1914 one tragic experience has followed another, as if history had been designed to refute the vain delusions of modern man."

"[The value and dignity of the individual] is threatened whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and ideals can be fitted with frictionless harmony into the collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete. He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community; but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within society. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he must abate his individual ambitions. He must 'die to self' if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment beyond every historical community he lives his life in painful tension with even the best community, sometimes achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards of the community with a resolute "we must obey God rather than man.""

"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about a particular degree of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized."

"Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning."

"Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb."

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

"The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet. There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause. Then religion mustn't interfere with the state — so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state. ... A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie."

"Not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard."

"We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people."

"We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation."

"The people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down. The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion. But now when the historic religions give trivial answers to these very tragic questions of our day, when an evangelist says, for instance, we mustn't hope for a summit meeting, we must hope in Christ without spelling out what this could mean in our particular nuclear age. This is the irrelevant answer, when another Evangelist says if America doesn't stop being selfish, it will be doomed. This is also a childish answer because nations are selfish and the question about America isn't whether we will be selfish or unselfish, but will we be sufficiently imaginative to pass the Reciprocal Trade Acts."

"I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god. That's much more dangerous than when people don't believe anything; they may be confused, they may not have a sense of the meaning of life, but they're not dangerous. The fanatic is dangerous. The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic."

"The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment. Nonetheless, the human situation is so, and this is why I think that the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism. That it believes that there is in man a radical freedom, and this freedom is creative but it is also destructive — and there's nothing that prevents this from being both creative and destructive. That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence."

"Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual — this freedom is necessary for the individual."

"Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism."

"My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits — the relevant fruits — are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends."

"It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of ."

"One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don't know about the ultimate judgment. It's beyond your judgment. And if you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion."

""Dread or anxiety," he explained, "is the psychological condition which precedes sin, comes as near as possible to it, and is as provocative as possible of dread, but without explaining sin, which breaks forth first in the qualitative leap." Kierkegaard saw this "sickness unto death" as an inherent factor in human existence, and he taught that a "synthesis" was needed, by which he meant a vital relationship of man with God by which man may resolve his inner conflicts and live at peace with himself. Influenced by these thoughts of Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr has developed the thesis that man is a creature of two dimensions: "He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit." As finite, man is a part of nature, subject to its laws and its vicissitudes; but as self-conscious, man transcends himself, being capable of viewing himself as object, and thus is a creature of spirit. As part of nature he is determined; as spirit he is above nature and free. It is natural to man, therefore, to be in tension between the two; that tension is his anxiety, which is not sin but tempts to sin."

"The reverential awe his words evoked reflects, in part, the shallowness and superficiality of the reigning intellectual culture. ... But to explain his status as "official establishment theologian" we must also attend to the lessons drawn from his exhortations. ... The inescapable "taint of sin on all historical achievements," the necessity to make "conscious choices of evil for the sake of good"—these are soothing doctrines for those preparing to "face the responsibilities of power," or in plain English, to set forth on a life of crime, to "play hardball" in their efforts to "maintain this position of disparity" between our overwhelming wealth and the poverty of others, in George Kennan's trenchant phrase as he urged in a secret document of 1948 that we put aside "idealistic slogans" and prepare "to deal in straight power concepts." Herein lies the secret of Niebuhr's enormous influence and success."

"Traditionally, the idea of the frailty of man led to the demand for obedience to ordained authority. But Niebuhr rejected that ancient conservative argument. Ordained authority, he showed, is all the more subject to the temptations of self-interest, self-deception and self-righteousness. Power must be balanced by power. He persuaded me and many of my contemporaries that original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility. Niebuhr's analysis was grounded in the Christianity of Augustine and Calvin, but he had, nonetheless, a special affinity with secular circles. His warnings against utopianism, messianism and perfectionism strike a chord today. We are beginning in this distraught decade to remember what we should never have forgotten: We cannot play the role of God to history, and we must strive as best we can to attain decency, clarity and proximate justice in an ambiguous world. Niebuhr the man? He was high-spirited, great-hearted, devoid of pomposity and pretense, endlessly curious about ideas and personalities, vigorous in his enthusiasms and criticisms, filled with practical wisdom and, for all his robust ego, a man of endearing humility."

"At Swanwick when Niebuhr had quit it A young man exclaimed "I have hit it! Since I cannot do right, I must find out tonight The right sin to commit and commit it.""

"Reinhold Niebuhr is a man of God, but a man of the world as well. Dr. Niebuhr would seem to be saying that if a nation would survive and remain free, its citizens must use religion as a source of self-criticism, not as a source of self-righteousness."

"Niebuhr updated what the Lutheran tradition calls the elenctic use of the law: the function of God's law is first to show us that we are sinners. Luther had made this claim about the Ten Commandments and other laws. Niebuhr applied it to the Sermon on the Mount; the function of these teachings of Jesus is to show us that we need forgiveness."

"If you had told me 28 years ago that the largest organization in the world touching the lives of gays and lesbians would be a church, I would not have believed you. So many members of the lesbian and gay community feel they have had violence done to them by religious groups that it is very difficult to evangelize any members of our community. But we do evangelize."

"Jesus died for our sins, not our sexuality."

"[P]ain is a marvelous purifier. . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely."

"Some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted. . . [T]wo or three stinging strokes on the legs or buttocks with a switch are usually sufficient to emphasize the point, 'You must obey me.'"

"KING: You're an outspoken supporter of Israel. You and Bill Bennett co-authored an op-ed piece on the subject, responding to a letter from a group of prominent Evangelical Christians who urged George W. Bush to employ an even handed policy toward Israel and Palestine. You don't want an even handed policy?"

"DOBSON: Well, I do. It depends on what you mean by that. I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture, but also, because America has stood with Israel. If we ever abandon it, it's gone. There are six million Jews in Israel. There are 400 million Muslims around them that hate them and want many of them -- hate them and want to drive them into the sea. And that is a major concern to me. It's the only democracy in the Middle East. Why wouldn't we support them?"

"KING: And the Palestinian people are the only people without a state..."

"DOBSON: Yes."

"KING: … of any kind. Should they have a state? Do you agree with the president there? There should be a Palestinian state?"

"KING: Franklin Graham called Islam a very wicked and evil religion. More recently, he said that Muslim leaders haven't done enough to show their sorrow over 9/11. Do you agree with that?"

"DOBSON: Well, I certainly agree that many factions within Islam are very, very violent. I mean, how can we deny that? The war against the west and against Israel certainly didn't start with 9/11. For us, it began really in 1979 when the Iranians, you know, invaded the embassy there. And from that point on, they've been doing things like this, so there's a lot of violence within the Islamic faith."

"KING: But you don't think the faith is violent? You don't think American Muslims are, by nature, violent, or Muslims are by nature violent or do you?"

"DOBSON: I think some Muslims are, but certainly..."

"KING: Well, some Christians are."

"DOBSON: Yes, but that..."

"KING: There's a lot of killing in the name of Christ in history."

"DOBSON: Yes, there has been down through the years, but I don't think that's the predominant factor. I mean, if you look at the teachings of Christ, the centerpiece is love. That's been the essence of what He has thought."

"KING: Not Mohammed — Mohammed did not teach love?"

"DOBSON: Not to that degree, no. There's a lot — you know I'm not an expert on this subject. I told you that last time we were here, and so I can just give you my impressions about it. And there are very, very violent people within the Islamic faith. There are also some that are not violent."

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth."

"GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Dr. Dobson, ...in the Daily Oklahoman, [you were] quoted saying, "Patrick Leahy is a God's people hater. I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people." Now, Dr. Dobson, that doesn't sound like a particularly Christian thing to say. Do you think you owe Senator Leahy an apology?"

"DR JAMES DOBSON: George, you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about? You know, I think -I think I'll stand by the things I have said. Patrick Leahy has been in opposition to most of the things that I believe. He is the one that took the reference to God out of the oath."

"GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But Dr. Dobson, excuse me for a second. You use the word hate. You said that he's a "God's people hater." How do you back that up?"

"DR JAMES DOBSON: Well, there's been an awful lot of hate expressed in this election. And most of it has been aimed at those who hold to conservative Christian views. He is certainly not the only one to take a position like that. But I think that that is -that's where he's coming from. He has certainly opposed most of the things that conservative Christians stand for."

"GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apology?"

"DR JAMES DOBSON: No apology."

"By learning to yield to the loving authority... of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life — his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers."

"Into that world comes a young William Wilberforce — a young Parliamentarian — who saw this and said this is evil, this is wrong, I will do what I can to fight it. In some ways, it's very similar to our situation here with regard to abortion because that's a multi-million dollar industry. You know the money that even our own Congress gives to Planned Parenthood is reminiscent of the evil that was expressed in that day because other Parliament members didn't want to touch that very lucrative business. And so here you've got Wilberforce standing up and saying "this is wrong" and he was vilified and attacked and discredited and marginalized. It sounds kind of familiar to what happens to pro-life people today."

"...and Britain was saved, because of a national day of prayer. Ladies and gentlemen, we desperately need our own Miracle of Dunkirk today."

"And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on."

"The "child-centered" proselytizers were met by a "parent-centered" corps of self-proclaimed "Judeo-Christian" experts loudly condemning the decadent state of American culture. Dr. James Dobson, psychologist and the author in 1970 of the popular Dare to Discipline, had long been active in the cause. The founder of the Focus on the Family, a right-wing Christian radio "ministry" with a following in the millions, he emerged as a prime mover in the conservative family values crusade that crested as the century ended."

"Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all."

"I will protect my people if I live. For myself I do not fear for I have the word of Usen. Who is the White Nantan to think he can pit his power against that of Usen?"

"In the beginning the world was covered with darkness. There was no sun, no day. The perpetual night had no moon or stars. There were, however, all manner of beasts and birds. Among the beasts were many hideous, nameless monsters, as well as dragons, lions, tigers, wolves, foxes, beavers, rabbits, squirrels, rats, mice, and all manner of creeping things such as lizards and serpents. Mankind could not prosper under such conditions, for the beasts and serpents destroyed all human offspring. All creatures had the power of speech and were gifted with reason."

"I cannot think we are useless or Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each."

"I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust."

"I am thankful that the President of the United States has given me permission to tell my story. I hope that he and those in authority under him will read my story and judge whether my people have been rightly treated."

"They held us in San Antonio … We had tents and blankets but no arms. We had food. But every minute we expected to be taken out and shot. Nobody said it aloud. Geronimo had been promised that he would not die by bullets (by Usen, the Apache God), but the rest had not."

"The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to."

"There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas."

"One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life."

"Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found."

"The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it."

"Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse."

"Dearly beloved — late again!"

"When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour…. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race."

"Him that I love, I wish to be Free — Even from me."

"I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth."

"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."

"Charles was a stubborn Swede, you know, and he himself never felt the need to explain his feelings about where he stood and about past statements. But I feel free now to elaborate on his actual attitudes. He never wanted to be regarded as a hero or leader, and he never had political ambitions. His prewar isolationist speeches were given in all sincerity for what he thought was the good of the country and the world... He was accused of being anti-Semetic, but in the 45 years I lived with him I never heard him make a remark against the Jews, not a crack or joke, and neither did any of our children."

"So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us — invisibly."

"Here sits the Unicorn In captivity; His bright invulnerability Captive at last"

"Here sits the Unicorn In captivity, Yet free."

"He could leap the corral, If he rose To his full height; He could splinter the fencing light, With three blows Of his porcelain hoofs in flight — If he chose. He could shatter his prison wall, Could escape them all — If he rose, If he chose."

"Here sits the Unicorn; The wounds in his side Still bleed"

"Dream wounds, dream ties Do not bind him there In a kingdom where He is unaware Of his wounds, of his snare."

"Here sits the Unicorn; Leashed by a chain of gold To the pomengranate tree. So light a chain to hold So fierce a beast; Delicate as a cross at rest On a maiden's breast. He could snap the golden chain With one toss of his mane, If he chose to move, If he chose to prove His liberty. But he does not choose What choice would lose. He stays, the Unicorn, In captivity."

"Yet look again — His horn is free, Rising above chain, fence, and tree, Free hymn of love; His horn Bursts from his tranquil brow Like a comet born; Cleaves like a galley's prow Into seas untorn; Springs like a lily, white From the Earth below; Spirals, a bird in flight To a longed-for height; Or a fountain bright, Spurting to light Of early morn — O luminous horn!"

"Here sits the Unicorn — In captivity? In repose."

"Forgotten the strife; Now the need to kill Has died like fire, And the need to love Has replaced desire"

"Quiet, the Unicorn, In contemplation stilled, With acceptance filled; Quiet, save for his horn; Alive in his horn; Horizontally, In captivity; Perpendicularly, Free."

"I … understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions … Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life."

"I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask."

"When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others."

"Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings."

"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea."

"The shape of my life today starts with a family. I have a husband, five children and a home just beyond the suburbs of New York. I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue. The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen. But I want first of all — in fact, as an end to these other desires — to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact — to borrow from the languages of the saints — to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and the inward man be at one." I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God."

"I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be "in grace" and other periods when they feel "out of grace," even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace."

"I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them."

"I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily — like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications."

"By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class."

"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."

"We must relearn to be alone."

"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few."

"I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole — perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding."

"I saw standing against the great stone pillar — on more red plush — a tall, slim boy in evening dress — so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I expected. A very refined face, not at all like those grinning 'Lindy' pictures — a firm mouth, clear, straight blue eyes, fair hair, and nice color. Then I went down the line very confused and overwhelmed by it all. He did not smile — just bowed and shook hands."

"We were high above fields, and there far, far below, was a small shadow as of a great bird tearing along the neatly marked off fields. It gave me the most tremendous shock to realize for the first time the terrific speed we were going at and that that shadow meant us — us, like a mirror! That "bird" — it was us."

"The feeling of exultant joy that there is anyone like that in the world. I shall never see him again, and he did not notice me, or would ever, but there is such a person alive, there is such a life, and I am here on this earth, in this age, to know it!"

"Don't wish me happiness — I don't expect to be happy; it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor — I will need them all."

"People don't want to be understood — I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left."

"I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant."

"I want to write — I want to write — I want to write and never never never will. I know it and I am so unhappy and it seems as though nothing else mattered. Whatever I'm doing, it's always there, an ultimate longing there saying, "Write this — write that — write —" and I can't. Lack ability, time, strength, and duration of vision. I wish someone would tell me brutally, "You can never write anything. Take up home gardening!""

"It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection — it is worth living for. It exists. It has been — it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace."

"I have come to believe that you can get along without anyone — that is, without the close contact of any one person. That is a terrible shock to me, but I think it is true. You do need companionship, but wherever you go, in whatever new environment, you will find people who, to a large degree, take the place of those you left...The intimate companionship goes, I think, when you leave a friend, but friendship stays. It is an inherent possibility of relationship that, once admitted — well, there it is."

"Life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life."

"Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages."

"I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light. … Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us — many days, many nights of stars."

"Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in."

"He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name "Jew" is un-American — even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?"

"Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ."

"As I do understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. He who has God's grace in his heart cannot go astray."

"I conceive there lies a clear rule in Titus, that the elder women should instruct the younger and then I must have a time wherein I must do it."

"Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court?"

"I shall I not equivocate, there is a meeting of men and women and there is a meeting only for women."

"One may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another, so I said. . . But when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth."

"If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true. Being much troubled to see the falseness of the constitution of the church of England, I had like to have turned separatist; whereupon I kept a day of solemn humiliation and pondering of the thing; this scripture was brought unto me — he that denies Jesus Christ to be come in the flesh is antichrist — This I considered of and in considering found that the papists did not deny him to be come in the flesh nor we did not deny him — who then was antichrist? . . . The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me. . . . I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong. Since that time I confess I have been more choice and he hath let me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved and the voice of Moses, the voice of John Baptist and the voice of antichrist, for all those voices are spoken of in scripture. Now if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord."

"I will give you another scripture, Jer. 46. 27, 28 — out of which the Lord shewed me what he would do for me and the rest of his servants. — But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me . . . Ever since that time I have been confident of what he hath revealed unto me. . . Therefore I desire you to look to it, for you see this scripture fulfilled this day and therefore I desire you that as you tender the Lord and the church and commonwealth to consider and look what you do. You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul, and assure yourselves thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ from you, and if you go on in this course you begin you will I bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. . ."

"You have spoken divers things as we have been informed very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex..."

"She was a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, a nimble wit and active spirit, a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man."

"Courageous Exponent of Civil Liberty and Religious Toleration"

"The Spirit tells me - Fidel Castro will die - in the 90's. Oooh my! Some will try to kill him and they will not succeed. But there will come a change in his physical health, and he will not stay in power, and Cuba will be visited of God."

"The Spirit of God tells me an earthquake will hit the East Coast of America and destroy much in the '90s. Not one place will be safe from earthquakes in the '90s. These who have not known earthquakes will know it. People, I feel the Spirit all over me!"

"We may have two years before the Rapture. Can I be blunt with you? I don't know if we have two years left. I'm going to prove to you from the Word tonight, that we have less than two years, unless the Lord changes his mind."

"But here's first what I see for Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). You're going to have people raised from the dead watching this network. You're going to have people raised from the dead watching TBN. Programs -- just plain programs -- programs that haven't done much when it comes to supernatural manifestations -- teaching programs!"

"Jesus is coming again within the next two years."

"I don't need gold in heaven, I gotta have it now."

"God the Father is a person separate from the Holy Ghost. Totally separate. ...Do you know that the Holy Spirit has a soul and a body separate from that of Jesus and the Father? ...God the Father then is a triune being within Himself. He's a person, He has a soul. ...A soul is an intellect. ...God thinks ...separate from the Son and separate from the Holy Ghost. ...God the Father is a separate individual from the Son and the Holy Ghost, who is a triune being who walks in a spirit body and He has hair...has eyes...has a mouth...has hands."

"Adam was a super being when God created him...he had dominion over the fowls of the air which means he used to fly...well of course how could you have dominion over the birds and not be able to do what they do. Adam flew into space, with one thought he would be on the moon."

"Jesus Christ will appear with me on the platform..."

"The reason people lose their healing, is because they begin questioning if God really did it."

"In his sermons and books, Hinn has portrayed his childhood as that of a social outcast, handicapped by a severe stutter, who was nonetheless a stellar student. But when G. Richard Fisher and M. Kurt Goedelman, two journalists who write for Personal Freedom Outreach, looked into Hinn's youth, they found that both claims were untrue: nobody remembered Hinn stuttering, and he had dropped out of high school after the 11th grade."

":Illustration by 4G² Issue #191, January/February 2004"

"Hinn claims to have preached at an all-girls Catholic school in Jerusalem in 1976 and "every single girl in that school got saved, including all the nuns." Since there's only one Catholic girls school in Jerusalem, Schmidt's Girls College, it was a fairly easy matter to question all the nuns who were there in 1976, as well as Father Dusind, who has overseen all religious instruction since 1955. The result? "This is nonsense, real nonsense," Dusind told Fisher and Goedelman. "It never happened and could not happen because a Charismatic healer or Protestant preacher would never ever be let in to talk to the girls."

"The heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield, banned from boxing because of a heart condition, went to a Benny Hinn crusade in Philadelphia, had Hinn lay hands on him, and gave Hinn a check for $265,000 after he was told he was healed. In fact, he passed his next examination by the boxing commission, but later his doctors said he never had a heart condition in the first place – he had been misdiagnosed."

":Illustration by 4G² Issue #191, January/February 2000"

"I am familiar with what goes on in the Arab countries, and I'm sad to say that most of us want to annihilate Israel. We want to kill all the Israelis... Do you know what they used to say in the mosques in Egypt? "We want to go to the White House and turn it into the Islamic House..." We call upon the Arab countries to stop teaching hatred to the Arab children."

"Jewish success is due to a culture that promotes excellence, blessed with self discipline, education, dedication and a quest for leaving this world a better place."

"Disagreements don't cause disunity, a lack of forgiveness does."

"It was a simple story, really. Yes, God had told us to get a ship, and repeatedly He had confirmed His guidance using all the ways we had learned for hearing His voice. He used the Wise Men Principle; He used Scriptures which He seemed to lift off the pages for us; He used provision of money and people, and that inner conviction -- but we had failed in the way we had carried out His guidance. We had subtly turned from the Giver to the gift."

"We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people's lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings. If not you, who? If not now, when? If not here, where?"

"… sometime around now, the rules for living successfully on earth shifted, and an opportunity, unseen before, began to reveal itself. This opportunity is a context-a particular space, or way of being-which unexpectedly creates the possibility for a person’s life to truly make a difference. In this context, the way each of us answers the question, ‘What is my life really going to be about?’ can literally alter the course of humanity."

"The possibility to create the context in which people’s lives really matter is undoubtedly the most profound opportunity available to anyone, ever."

"You and I want our lives to matter. We want our lives to make a real difference — to be of genuine consequence in the world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going through the motions in life, even if those motions make us successful or even if we have arranged to make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have had some impact on the world. In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality of life. We want to make the world work."

"At all times and under all circumstances, we have the power to transform the quality of our lives."

"To take a stand for the future is to bring forth a new opportunity, not one derived from the past, but an opportunity created from a future to which we give ourselves."

"[[Alan Watts|[Alan] Watts]] did two main things for me. He opened up the connections between what I was doing and the traditional Oriental philosophies. And he pointed me toward the distinction between Self and Mind."

"The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at that same moment you will never have to be that way again."

"Love for a person is acceptance of him or her the way he is and the way he is not."

"Does it really work for us to go through our lives as though there were no realizations beyond the grasp of our system-of-concepts, the awareness of which would transform the quality of our lives?"

"Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est."

"Obviously the truth is what's so. Not so obviously, it is also so what."

"I got a lot of benefit from auditing. It was the fastest and deepest way to handle situations that I had yet encountered. I immediately wanted to learn to do it. … With Scientology, I was able to characterize the Mind more accurately, and to cease justifying it. This greatly clarified what I was doing. … After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the Mind as a machine. I can now operate my Mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments - the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things. Many people can do such things, and they are well known in the yogic tradition."

"I am a sort of revolutionary. I have a strange ambition, though. I don’t want any statues. What I want is for the world to work. I want to create a context in which government, education, and families are nurturing. I want to en­able, to empower, the institutions of man. Social transformation doesn’t argue against social change. Radicalism and resistance produce obvious values. But after a while, social change chases its own tail. Social change just produces social change. After most ordinary revolutions, after most social change, the world still doesn’t work. For the world to work you must have social transformation, which creates the space for effective social change."

"The essential difference between est and Scientology is two-fold. The first has to do with Scientology’s emphasis on survival and its idea that the purpose of life is survival. est sees the purpose of life as wholeness or completion – truth – not survival...The other main difference between est and Scientology lies in the treatment of knowing. Ron Hubbard seems to have no difficulty in codifying the truth and in urging people to believe it. But I suspect all codifications, particularly my own. In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself. I don’t think anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it."

"Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness."

"You and I possess within ourselves, at every moment of our lives and under all circumstances, the power to transform the quality of our lives."

"Most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don't examine or question. We bring these assumptions to the table with us as a given. They are so much a part of who we are that it is difficult for us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions, we think from them."

"Until what is significant is created by you, you aren’t living your life, you are living some inherited life."

"Here’s my definition of a hero. A hero is an ordinary person given being and action by something bigger than themselves. One thing I’m sure about is I’m real ordinary. Yet I’ve had the chance to touch the lives of a lotta people."

"If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me’. Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central! Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence."

"When my integrity is lacking, I am clear that I just got to be a bit smaller as a person. That keeps me working on my integrity. And the thing about integrity is it’s a mountain with no top."

"Here is where it is. Now is when it is. You are what it is."

"Man keeps looking for a truth to fit his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit."

"The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century."

"You are god in your own universe. There is no god unless it is self."

"Something experienced is true; the same thing believed is a lie."

"I have a lot of respect for L. Ron Hubbard and I consider him to be a genius and perhaps less acknowledged than he ought to be."

"Mastering life is the process of moving from where you are to where you want to be."

"Miracles occur in direct proportion to our willingness to have them."

"Transformation does not negate what has gone before; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense."

"There are only two things in the world — nothing and semantics."

"How do I know I'm not the reincarnation of Jesus Christ?"

"What is, is."

"What isn't, isn't. You can't put it together...what you have to do is experience it being together."

"You are part of every atom in the world, and every atom is part of you."

"I take responsibility for ending starvation within twenty years. The Hunger Project is not about solutions. It's not about fixing up the project. It's not about anybody's good idea. The Hunger Project is about creating a context - creating the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come. (Quote from 1977, re: The Hunger Project)"

"Belief in God is the single greatest barrier to God in the Universe. It is almost a total barrier to the experience of God. When you think you have experienced God, you haven't. Experiencing God is experiencing God, and that is true religion."

"What I recognized is that you can't put it together. It's already together, and what you have to do is experience it being together."

"Happiness is a function of accepting what is."

"You can either have reasons or results."

"Werner Erhard is at once a thoughtful student of, and contributor to, the continuing philosophical dialogue that has cradled the world civilization in which we all dwell today. Unlike many philosophers and students of philosophy, he not only originates and develops ideas, but also profoundly touches people with them- thereby transforming people’s experience of what is possible for human beings and their ability to act on that possibility."

"Without Carl Rogers and Werner Erhard coaching would not exist."

"“I credit Werner Erhard as one of the founders of contemporary coaching. Werner Erhard introduced the idea of transformation in the early 1970s through his est courses which opened people’s minds to the possibility of their growth and potential.""

"Werner Erhard is virtually the only consciousness leader, and the only person of distinction in American society to have stepped outside this childish quarrel between Scientology and society and to have acknowledged both his indebtedness to Hubbard and his emphatic differences with him."

"I became convinced we should work to get this kind of transformational material into the academies,” he said, adding that he considers Mr. Erhard “one of the great intellectuals of the century."

"Erhard’s exact whereabouts have been somewhat vague these past 20 years, since he was hounded out of the US after some of the worst publicity a man can have, involving allegations of incest, tax fraud and abuse. Even though these were all dropped, he tells me he left the country on his solicitor’s advice and has been based in the Caribbean ever since."

"Erhard is the man who more or less invented the personal growth movement in California in the early 1970s."

"Erhard’s influence extends far beyond the couple of million people who have done his courses."

"Werner Erhard, a former used-car salesman, made millions with EST, but it turned out to be just another moneymaking scam disguised as a form of therapy."

"Est came to an end in the early nineties when critical stories began appearing in the Bay Area. These newspaper reports detailed Erhard's violent temper and included charges that he beat his wife and molested his children. The low point was a March 3, 1991, segment on the CBS program 60 Minutes that interviewed three of his daughters about the alleged abuse. (Erhard denied it.) After an hour of 60 Minutes, Erhard was as dead as Audi. One might have thought that Werner Erhard, the company, was beyond saving. Not true. The name was destroyed, but not the company. Before the CBS program ran, but with knowledge of what it would likely say, Erhard sold the assets of Werner Erhard & Associates to his former employees and moved to Costa Rica. The new name: Landmark Education Corporation."

"Erhard maintains that he had a clear business purpose for engaging in the transactions because he desired to terminate his relationship with Margolis... However, even if Erhard had a legitimate business purpose for terminating his relationship with Margolis, that did not give him a business purpose for engaging in the specific transactions at issue here. The fact that he may have had a good business reason for separating from Margolis does not necessarily justify resorting to circular money movements (that just happened to create tax benefits) to effectuate that separation."

"“I met Hawking and Gerard’t Hooft in the attic of Werner Erhard’s house where Erhard’s office was located in San Francisco. … Dick Feynman, myself, and David Finkelstein were Erhard’s gurus. … He was very, very smart.”"

"The American obsession with Transformation isn’t new. It’s about as old as the nation. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the “infinitude of man.” Norman Vincent Peale was an early bestselling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard who created the first modern transformation when he founded est seminars in 1971. It’s a tribute to the power of his central concept that more than 20 years after he sold his ideas to a group of employees Landmark is still the natural first stop in any transformation tour."

"In the first place, est-Forum was primarily a business, efficiently directed by its founder and head Werner Erhard for the purpose of making a profit. Indeed, the internal discipline of the organization was so strong that its style of operation has been labeled as fascist."

"Rules without relationship leads to rebellion."

"If someone tries to tell you you are the greatest generation in the history of America, don't believe them. You aren't. You have the capability to be, but you aren't."

"The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not."

"...I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that's exactly what has happened. It's like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there... This abundance has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field."

"I'll stand with President Bush on national security, the war on terrorism and to disarm Saddam Hussein."

"I have supported the President in his efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein. I think Iraq poses a threat to the region; he poses a threat to our interests both abroad and here at home. And, I think it is important for the President to build support among our allies, to build support at the UN for what he's doing, but that face is that Saddam Hussein over last 11 years has refused to obey 16 UN resolutions. He is a megalomaniac. He's been a threat to his own people. And we can't negotiate with him in the same way that we've been able to negotiate with the heads of other opposing nations."

"I supported the Bush tax cut."

"I appreciate your concerns, and we have to be cautious and deliberate; however, I do agree with President Bush that Saddam has got to go. He poses too much of a threat."

"I want to reiterate my support for President Bush's goals for regime change in Iraq."

"I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore."

"Rosey Grier, immortalized in needlepoint - and by my own hands to boot! If anyone would have told me that I would go from football to needlepoint, I would have laughed in their face. In fact, the whole thing started as a joke, but it's turned into one of the most enjoyable and satisfying things I've ever done. I try to turn other guys on to needlepoint wherever I go - from the dude sitting next to me on a plane to the guy working behind the scenes on a movie set. 'Smile all you want,' I tell them, 'but if you try it once, you'll keep on coming back for more,' and that's the truth brother."

"Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother."

"The Natives of the Country now Possessed by the New-Englanders, had been forlorn and wretched Heathen ever since their first herding there; and tho' we know not When or How those Indians first became Inhabitants of this mighty Continent, yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoy'd those miserable Salvages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his Absolute Empire over them."

"Your Knowledge has Qualified You to make those Reflections on the following Relations, which few can Think, and tis not fit that all should See. How far the Platonic Notions of Demons which were, it may be, much more espoused by those primitive Christians and Scholars that we call The Fathers, than they see countenanced in the ensuing Narratives, are to be allowed by a serious man, your Scriptural Divinity, join'd with Your most Rational Philosphy, will help You to Judge at an uncommon rate. Had I on the Occasion before me handled the Doctrin of Demons, or launced forth into Speculations about magical Mysteries, I might have made some Ostentation, that I have read something and thought a little in my time; but it would neither have been Convenient for me, nor Profitable for those plain Folkes, whose Edification I have all along aimed at. I have therefore here but briefly touch't every thing with an American Pen; a Pen which your Desert likewise has further Entitled You to the utmost Expressions of Respect and Honor from. Though I have no Commission, yet I am sure I shall meet with no Crimination, if I here publickly wish You all manner of Happiness, in the Name of the great Multitudes whom you have laid under everlasting Obligations. Wherefore in the name of the many hundred Sick people, whom your charitable and skilful Hands have most freely dispens'd your no less generous than secret Medicines to; and in the name of Your whole Countrey, which hath long had cause to believe that you will succeed Your Honourable Father and Grandfather in successful Endeavours for our Welfare; I say, In their Name, I now do wish you all the Prosperity of them that love Jerusalem. And whereas it hath been sometimes observed, That the Genius of an Author is commonly Discovered in the Dedicatory Epistle, I shall be content if this Dedicatory Epistle of mine, have now discovered me to be,"

"Go tell Mankind, that there are Devils and Witches; and that tho those night-birds least appear where the Day-light of the Gospel comes, yet New-Engl. has had Exemples of their Existence and Operation; and that no only the Wigwams of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters, in the shapes of Bears and Snakes and Fires, but the House of Christians, where our God has had his constant Worship, have undergone the Annoyance of Evil spirits. Go tell the world, What Prays can do beyond all Devils and Witches, and What it is that these Monsters love to do; and through the Demons in the Audience of several standers-by threatned much disgrace to thy Author, if he let thee come abroad, yet venture That, and in this way seek a just Revenge on Them for the Disturbance they have given to such as have called on the Name of God."

"First: my Friend planted a Row of Indian corn that was Coloured Red and Blue; the rest of the Field being planted with corn of the yellow, which is the most usual color. To the Windward side, this Red and Blue Row, so infected Three or Four whole Rows, as to communicate the same Colour unto them; and part of ye Fifth and some of ye Sixth. But to the Leeward Side, no less than Seven or Eight Rows, had ye same Colour communicated unto them; and some small Impressions were made on those that were yet further off."

"If in the midst of the many Dissatisfaction among us, the publication of these Trials may promote such a pious Thankfulness unto God, for Justice being so far executed among us, I shall Re-joyce that God is Glorified..."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"The Puritans in New England were not immediately presented with an Indian problem, for diseases introduced earlier by trading ships along the coast had badly decimated the Indian population. Yet when the Pequots resisted the migration of settlers into the Connecticut Valley in 1637, a party of Puritans surrounded the Pequot village and set fire to it. About five hundred Indians were burned to death or shot while trying to escape; the Whites devoutly offered up thanks to God that they had lost only two men. The woods were then combed for any Pequots who had managed to survive, and these were sold into slavery. Cotton Mather was grateful to the Lord that "on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell.""

"Mr. Buroughs (sic) was carried in a Cart with others, through the streets of Salem, to Execution. When he was upon the Ladder, he made a speech for the clearing of his Innocency, with such Solemn and Serious Expressions as were to the Admiration of all present; his Prayer (which he concluded by repeating the Lord's Prayer) [as witches were not supposed to be able to recite] was so well worded, and uttered with such composedness as such fervency of spirit, as was very Affecting, and drew Tears from many, so that if seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution. The accusers said the black Man [Devil] stood and dictated to him. As soon as he was turned off [hung], Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted upon a Horse, addressed himself to the People, partly to declare that he [Mr. Burroughs] was no ordained Minister, partly to possess the People of his guilt, saying that the devil often had been transformed into the Angel of Light. And this did somewhat appease the People, and the Executions went on; when he [Mr. Burroughs] was cut down, he was dragged by a Halter to a Hole, or Grave, between the Rocks, about two feet deep; his Shirt and Breeches being pulled off, and an old pair of Trousers of one Executed put on his lower parts: he was so put in, together with [John] Willard and [Martha] Carrier, that one of his Hands, and his Chin, and a Foot of one of them, was left uncovered."

"If anyone imagines that we are stating the case too strongly, let him try an experiment with the first bright boy he meets by asking,..."

"Cotton Mather never in any public writing 'denounced the admission' of it, never advised its absolute exclusion; but on the contrary recognized it as a ground of 'presumption' ... [and once admitted] nothing could stand against it. Character, reason, common sense, were swept away."

"My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths."

"When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? — a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine."

"Great occasions rally great principles, and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a bearing that is even above itself. But trials that make no occasion at all, leave it to show the goodness and beauty it has in its own disposition. And here precisely is the superhuman glory of Christ as a character, that He is just as perfect, exhibits just as great a spirit in little trials as in great ones."

"It is the grandeur of Christ's character which constitutes the chief power of His ministry, not His miracles or teachings apart from. His character. The greatest truth of the gospel is Christ Himself — a human body become the organ of the Divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an earthly life, the glory of God."

"Christ's sacrifice stands in glorious proportions with the work to be done. Nothing else or less would suffice. It is a work supernatural, transacted in the plane of nature; and what but such a work could restore the broken order of the soul under evil?"

"Christ wants to lead men by their love, their personal love to Him, and the confidence of His personal love to them."

"Jesus is the true manifestation of God, and He is manifested to be the regenerating power of a divine life."

"O Thou Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, what Thou bearest in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear; take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love, mold me to the image of Thy divine passion."

"Be sure that Christ is not behind you, but before, calling and drawing you on. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend."

"Jesus does not drive His followers on before, as a herd of unwilling disciples, but goes before Himself, leading them into paths that He has trod, and dangers He has met, and sacrifices He has borne Himself, calling them after Him and to be only followers."

"Christ is known only by them that receive Him into their love, their faith, their deep want; known only as He is enshrined within, felt as a Divine force, breathed in the inspirations of the secret life."

"God listens for nothing so tenderly, as when His children help each other by their testimonies to His goodness and the way in which He has brought them deliverance."

"Live as with God; and, whatever be your calling, pray for the gift that will perfectly qualify you in it."

"Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character."

"Christianity is no mere scheme of doctrine or of ethical practice, but is instead a kind of miracle, a power out of nature and above, descending into it; a historically supernatural movement on the world, that is visibly entered into it, and organized to be an institution in the person of Jesus Christ."

"Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty."

"Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability."

"What we want, above all things, in this age is heartiness and holy simplicity; men who justify the holy impulse of grace in their hearts, and do not keep it back by artificial clogs of prudence and false fear, or the sham pretences of fastidiousness and artificial delicacy. These are they whom God will make His witnesses in all ages. They dare to be holy, dare just as readily to be singular. What God puts in them, that they accept; and when He puts a song, they sing it. They know Christ inwardly, and therefore stand for Him outwardly. They endure hardships. They fight a fight. And these are the souls, my brethren, who will stand before God accepted."

"O, if we could tear aside the vail, and see for but one hour what it signifies to be a soul in the power of an endless life, what a revelation would it be!"

"Faith is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour."

"Go to the cross, and meet there God in sacrifice. Behold Him as Jesus bearing your sin, receiving the shafts of your enmity! Embrace Him, believe in Him, take Him to your inmost heart. Do this, and you shall feel sin die within you, and a glorious quickening, Christ the power of God, Christ in you the hope of glory, shall be consciously risen upon you, as the morn of your new creation."

"If you could once get away, my friends, from that sense of mediocrity and nothingness to which you are shut up, under the stupor of your self-seeking and your sin, how easy would it be for you to believe! Nay, if but some faintest suspicion could steal into you of what your soul is, and the tremendous evils working in it, nothing but the mystery of Christ's death and passion would be sufficient for you."

"We shall never recover the true apostolic energy, and be endued with power from on high, as the first disciples were, 'till we recover the lost faith."

"However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of this world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment, light enough to satisfy, nay, to ravish the mind forever."

"Be an observer of providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which He leads you, whither He means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world's wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever He brings to your hand."

"The reason why those who are converted to Christ often make so poor a work of rectifying their old habits, is that they lay down their work in the very places where it needs to be prosecuted most carefully, that is, in their common employments. They do not live to God in that which is least."

"We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there."

"We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace Him, by committing our total being and eternity to Him, we find every thing is transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us, testifying with the apostle,— Christ liveth in me."

"Trust in God for great things. With your five loaves and two fishes He will show you a way to feed thousands."

"As long as we abide in Christ, our action is from Him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature."

"Our communion with Christ is not on a level of our common humanity, but we rise in it; we scale the heavens where He sitteth at the right hand of God; we send our longings up and ask to have attachments knit to Him; to be set in deepest, holiest, and most practical affinity with Him; and so to live a life that is hid with Christ in God. In such a life, we become partakers of His holiness, and, in the separating grace of that, partakers also of His power."

"It is imperative that Christians be like Jesus, by living freely within the culture as missionaries who are as faithful to the Father and His gospel as Jesus was in His own time and place."

"You have been told that God is a loving, gracious, merciful, kind, compassionate, wonderful, and good sky fairy who runs a day care in the sky and has a bucket of suckers for everyone because we're all good people. That is a lie... God looks down and says 'I hate you, you are my enemy, and I will crush you,' and we say that is deserved, right and just, and then God says 'Because of Jesus I will love you and forgive you.' This is a miracle."

"I study the Bible all week, pray to the Lord, and then I speak from my heart. It's all about brutal honesty."

"…the truths of Christianity are constant, unchanging, and meant for all people, times, and places. But the methods by which truth is articulated and practiced must be culturally appropriated, and therefore constantly translated …if doctrine is constant and practice is constantly changing, the result is living orthodoxy."

"Ultimately I think the difference between reading the Bible and studying it is making the connections between who Jesus is and what he's done."

"I'll preach anywhere. If it's a round trip ticket to preach in hell, I'll take it—as long as it's round trip."

"A pacifist has a lot of difficulty reconciling pacifism with scripture."

"Everyone is sinning, so it's no longer rebellious to sin. You're just a conformist if you're drunk; and naked; driving around in a loud motorcycle; smoking cigarrettes; breaking commandments; getting pregnant out of wedlock. Everyone's done that. That's so tired!"

"If you really want to be a rebel get a job, cut your grass, read your bible, and shut up. Because no one is doing that."

"Prayer is a bridge from despair to hope."

"Perfect peace comes only through relating with the Peacemaker himself."

"Prayerless people cut themselves off from God's peace and from his prevailing power, and a common result is that they feel overwhelmed, overrun, beaten down, pushed around, and defeated by a world operating with a take-no-prisoners approach."

"The idea that God doesn't care about his children is rooted in a lie, plain and simple."

"God is righteous and just, holy and tender, responsive and sympathetic. He is willing--anxious even--to hear from you. Moreover, he is willing to act on your behalf."

"The reality is that our God is good. It's in his nature to be good; it's who he is--a giving God, a blessing God, an encouraging God, a nurturing God, an empowering God, a loving God. This is the God who willingly waits for your call."

"Creating planets didn't seem to be much of a problem for God. Neither was raising the dead. Nothing is too difficult for God to handle, but we won't see much proof of this until we actually ask him to handle it."

"Our spirits, like our bodies, have requirements for health and growth. Some people don't want to pay the price of developing good spiritual habits."

"When we make a habit of prayer, we stay constantly tuned to God's presence and open to receive his blessings."

"People who are serious about something always make room for it in their schedules. If prayer is important to you, then you'll find time to do it."

"God doesn't want us to pile up impressive phrases. He doesn't want us to use words without thinking about their meaning. He wants us to talk to him as to a friend or father - authentically, reverently, personally, earnestly."

"Don't ask God to bless junk food and miraculously transform it so that it has nutritional value. That's not how God works."

"God isn't interested in stock phrases. Talk to him. Talk to the Father sincerely."

"Never forget that if you are God's child through Jesus Christ, you are praying to a Father who couldn't love you more than he already does."

"Don't let your prayers turn into a wish list for Santa Claus. Worship God and praise him when you come to him in prayer."

"God-honoring prayers are not simply shopping lists. They are more than cries for help, strength, mercy and miracles. Authentic prayer should include worship, submission, requests, and confessions."

"The Lord's Prayer is an excellent model, but it was never intended to be a magical incantation to get God's attention. Jesus gave this prayer as a pattern to suggest the variety of elements that should be included when we pray."

"If Christ's followers aren't growing, it is because they are not making a habit of evaluating their lives. They don't step back and ask, "What's working and what's not working?""

"I soon began writing out my whole prayer and reading it back to God. Previously I'd get no further than "Dear God" and I'd already be thinking of the person I was going to meet for lunch or the board meeting agenda or what my family members and I would be doing later that evening. But when I began to move pen across paper, it became much easier to remain focused."

"The key is to practice praying - and to practice praying regularly, privately, sincerely and specifically."

"I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer...but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God's miracle-working ways."

"Playing around is one thing; following an established regimen is quite another. It's true with exercise equipment and it is true with prayer."

"Developing prayer fitness is similar to developing physical fitness: we must follow a pattern in order to stay balanced."

"Sensing the carelessness and one-sidedness of our prayers, we start to feel guilty about praying. Guilt leads to faint-heartedness and that in turn leads to prayerlessness."

"Out-of-balance praying leads to no praying at all!"

"One prayer routine that is balanced and easy to remember is found in the word ACTS, an acrostic whose four letters stand for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication."

"Adoration in prayer reminds us of God's identity and inclination. As we list his attributes, lifting up his character and personality, we reinforce our understanding of who he is."

"When the spirit of adoration takes over and we begin pondering God's attributes, we soon say from the heart, 'I am praying to a tremendous God!' Which only motivates us to keep on praying."

"Adoration in prayer purges our spirit and prepares us to listen to God."

"Confession is probably the most neglected area of personal prayer."

"When I lump all my sins together and confess them en masse, I neglect to feel the pain or embarrassment or shame that should be elicited in me."

"We don't take confession seriously enough. If we did, our lives would be radically different."

"If you're a parent, you know how incredibly good it feels when one of your children spontaneously thanks you for something. God is our Father, and he, too, is moved when we express our thanksgiving."

"Supplications are requests that you make of God. And truly, nothing is too big for God to handle or too small for him to be interested in."

"I sometimes wonder if my requests are legitimate. So I'm honest with God. I say, "Lord, I don't know if I have the right to ask for this. I don't know how I should pray about it. But I hand it over to your now, and if you'll tell me how to pray, I'll pray your way.""

"When I pray, I'm not just telling God my problems, but rather I'm turning over my biggest concerns to him. It's only when I've put them in his capable hands that I can go about my day in his strength and freedom."

"Our prayers can be more than empty wishes, vain hopes or feeble aspirations – but only when they are prayed from faith-filled hearts."

"There are two main principles I've picked up over the years as they pertain to cultivating the type of faith that moves mountains. The first is this: Faith comes by looking at God, not at the mountain. The second is this: God gives us faith as we walk by his side."

"How do you pray a prayer so filled with faith that it can move a mountain? By shifting your focus from the size of your mountain to the sufficiency of the Mountain Mover and then stepping forward in obedience."

"As you walk with God, your faith will grow, your confidence will increase and your prayers will have real power."

"If the request is wrong, God says, "No." If the timing is wrong, God says, "Slow." If you are wrong, God says, "Grow." But if the request is right, the timing is right and you are right, God says, "Go!""

"If the disciples were capable of making wrong requests - requests that were self-serving, patently materialistic, shortsighted or immature - I feel sure that we are too. Fortunately God loves us too much to say yes to inappropriate requests."

"Before bringing a request to the Lord, it's a good idea to ask: If God granted this request, would it bring glory to him? Would it advance his kingdom? Would it help people? Would it help me to grow spiritually?"

"By forcing us to look closely at our requests, prayer purifies us."

"God is no more intimidated by childish demands for instant gratification than are wise parents."

"Be wary of insisting that you know better than God about when a prayer request should be granted. God's delays are not necessarily denials. He always has reasons for his 'not yets.'"

"A lot of spiritual gains come through pain, hurt, struggle, confusion and disappointment."

"The greatest prayer motivator in existence is answered prayer."

"The most common cause of unanswered prayer is prayerlessness."

"Are you expecting God to fill your needs? Are you asking him to do so - regularly, earnestly and persistently?"

"Unconfessed sin cuts off our communication with the Father."

"If you let even a little sin into your heart, it's going to contaminate your prayers. Your Christian life will not achieve its full potential."

"If you're tolerating sin in your life, my friend, don't waste your breath praying unless it's a prayer of confession."

"Prayer busters (causes of unanswered prayer) are prayerlessness, unconfessed sin, unresolved relational conflict, selfishness, uncaring attitudes, and inadequate faith."

"How would you feel if your prayer requests were made public, displayed on a billboard or marquee? "Dear Lord, make me famous. Make me rich.""

"When Jesus prayed the model prayer we call the Lord's Prayer, his first requests were that God's name be shown reverence, that his kingdom come, that his will be done."

"God is committed to developing a people who will reflect his character in this world, and his character always expresses concern and compassion for the afflicted."

"If your ear is open to the afflicted, God will keep his ear open to you."

"One reason we stop praying or let our prayer lives fade is that we are too comfortable."

"The time of day we choose for prayer doesn't matter, so long as we keep it faithfully. Prayer must be part of the rhythm of our daily lives."

"Sin is plenty strong enough to create an ever-widening gap in one's relationship with God. The wider the gap, the less likely we are to pray. And the less we pray, the wider the gap becomes."

"We can have no deep, ongoing fellowship with God unless we obey him - totally."

"If you have pumped your fist at God, the good news is that you can come back into fellowship with him right this minute."

"Keep on praying because the Father does listen. He loves our company, he wants us to endure in prayerfulness and he is eager to do whatever is best for us."

"Most of us are far too busy for our own spiritual good."

"Authentic Christianity is a supernatural walk with a living, dynamic, communicating God."

"The heart and soul of the Christian life is learning to hear God's voice and then developing the courage to do what he asks us to do."

"Authentic Christians are persons who stand apart from others. Their character seems deeper, their ideas fresher, their spirit softer, their courage greater, their leadership stronger, their concerns wider, their compassion more genuine and their convictions more concrete."

"Busyness is the unrivaled archenemy of spiritual authenticity."

"A key ingredient in authentic Christianity is time. Not leftover time, not throwaway time, but quality time. Time for contemplation, meditation and reflection. Unhurried, uninterrupted time."

"If your life is rushing in many directions at once, you are incapable of the kind of deep, unhurried prayer that is vital to the Christian walk."

"Language is the picture and counterpart of thought."

"The essential elements of giving are power and love — activity and affection — and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other."

"All mental discipline and symmetrical growth are from activity of the mind under the yoke of the will or personal power."

"Man can have strength of character only as he is capable of controlling his faculties; of choosing a rational end; and, in its pursuit, of holding fast to his integrity against al! the might of external nature."

"Whatever capacities there may be for enjoyment or for suffering in this strange being of ours, and God only knows what they are, they will be drawn out wholly in accordance with character."

"But for us there are moments, O, how solemn, when destiny trembles in the balance, and the preponderance of either scale is by our own choice."

"In Christ we see the strength of achievement, and the strength of endurance. He moved with a calm majesty, like the sun. The bloody sweat, and the crown of thorns, and the cross, were full in His eyes; but He was obedient unto death. In His perfect self-sacrifice, we see the perfection of strength; in the love that prompted it, we see the perfection of beauty. This combination of self-sacrifice and love must be commenced in every Christian; and when it shall be in its spirit complete in him, then will he also be perfect in strength and beauty."

"Certainly, no revolution that has ever taken place in society can be compared to that which has been produced by the words of Jesus Christ."

"He planted His cross in the midst of the mad and roaring current of selfishness, aggravated to malignity, and uttered from it the mighty cry of expiring love. And the waters heard Him, and from that moment they began to be refluent about His cross. From that moment, a current deeper and broader and mightier began to set heavenward; and it will continue to be deeper and broader and mightier till its glad waters shall encompass the earth, and toss themselves as the ocean. And not alone did earth hear the cry. It pierced the regions of immensity. Heaven heard it, and hell heard it, and the remotest star shall hear it, testifying to the love of God in His unspeakable gift, and to the supremacy of that blessedness of giving which could be reached only through death — the death of the cross."

"Guided by His wisdom, strong in His strength, there maybe for you struggle and suffering, the darkness and the storm. "The disciple is not above His Master." There may be weeping that shall endure for a night, but joy shall come in the morning. If the night cometh, so also the morning, "a morning without clouds," the morning of an eternal day."

"The strength that we want is not a brute, unregulated strength; the beauty that we want is no mere surface beauty; but we want a beauty on the surface of life that is from the central force of principle within, as the beauty on the cheek of health is from the central force at the heart."

"The patriarchal, the Jewish, and the Christian dispensations, are evidently but the unfolding of one general plan. In the first we see the folded bud; in the second the expanded leaf; in the third the blossom and the fruit. And now, how sublime the idea of a religion thus commencing in the earliest dawn of time; holding on its way through all the revolutions of kingdoms and the vicissitudes of the race; receiving new forms, but always identicalin spirit; and, finally, expanding and embracing in one great brotherhood the whole family of man! Who can doubt that such a religion was from God? —"

"No, there is nothing on the face of the earth that can, for a moment, bear a comparison with Christianity as a religion for man. Upon this the hope of the race hangs. From the very first, it took its position, as the pillar of fire, to lead the race onward. The intelligence and power of the race are with those who have embraced it; and now, if this, instead of proving indeed a pillar of fire from God, should be found but a delusive meteor, then nothing will be left to the race but to go back to a darkness that may be felt, and to a worse than Egyptian bondage."

"When I see how fragmentary the structure of religious knowledge was left by nature, when I see how inadequate all the labors of man had proved for its completion, — and when I look at the glorious and completed dome reared by Christianity, I cannot but feel that other than human hands have been employed in its structure."

"We say then, that Christianity is adapted to the intellect, because its spirit coincides with that of true philosophy; because it removes the incubus of sensuality and low vice; because of the place it gives to truth; because it demands free inquiry; because its mighty truths and systems are brought before the mind in the same way as the truths and systems of nature; because it solves higher problems than nature can; and because it is so communicated as to be adapted to every mind."

"Christianity excludes malignity, subdues selfishness, regulates the passions, subordinates the appetites, quickens the intellect, exalts the affections. It promotes industry, honesty, truth, purity, kindness. It humbles the proud, exalts the lowly, upholds law, favors liberty, is essential to it, and would unite men in one great brotherhood. It is the breath of life to social and civil well-being here, and spreads the azure of that heaven into whose unfathomed depths the eye of faith loves to look."

"Christianity alone inspires and guides progress; for the progress of man is movement toward God. and movement toward God wili ensure a gradual unfolding of all that exalts and adorns man."

"Let the church come to God in the strength of a perfect weakness, in the power of a felt helplessness and a child-like confidence, and then, either she has no strength, and has no right to be, or she has a strength that is infinite. Then and thus, will she stretch out the rod over the seas of difficulty that lie before her, and the waters shall divide, and she shall pass through, and sing the song of deliverance."

"Nothing but the cross of Christ can so startle the spiritual nature from its torpor, as to make it an effectual counterpoise to the debasing and sensual tendencies of the race. Favored by temperament and education, individuals may measurably escape; but if the race is to triumph in the conflict between the flesh and the spirit, between the lower propensities and the higher nature, they must, as Constantine is said to have done, see the cross, and on it the motto, "In hoc signo vinces." By this sign we conquer."

"To be energetic and firm where principle demands it, and tolerant in all else, is not easy. It is not easy to abhor wickedness, and oppose it with every energy, and at the same time to have the meekness and gentleness of Christ, becoming all things to all men for the truth's sake. The energy of patience, the most godlike of all, is not easy."

"Faith then, in its relation to salvation, is that confidence by which we accept it as a free gift from the Saviour, and is the only possible way in which the gift of God could be appropriated."

"Faith, then, generically, is confidence in a personal being. Specifically, religious faith is confidence in God, in every respect and office in which He reveals Himself. As that love of which God is the object, is religious love, so that confidence in Him as a Father, a Moral Governor, a Redeemer, a Sanctifier, in all the modes of His manifestation, by which we believe whatever He says because He says it, and commit ourselves and all our interests cheerfully and entirely into His hands, is, religious faith."

"The moral government of God is a movement in a line onwards towards some grand consummation, in which the principles, indeed, are ever the same, but the developments are always new,— in which, therefore, no experience of the past can indicate with certainty what new openings of truth, what new manifestations of goodness, what new phases of the moral heaven may appear."

"Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such, the providence of God has commanded science to labor and prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron tracks, and stretching her wires, and bridging the oceans. But where are they? Who shall breathe into our civil and political relations the breath of a higher life? Who shall touch the eyes of a paganized science, and of a pantheistic philosophy, that they may see God? Who shall consecrate to the glory of God, the triumphs of science? Who shall bear the life-boat to the stranded and perishing nations?"

"The infidelity that springs from the heart is not to be reached by a course of lectures on the evidences of Christianity; argument did not cause, and argument will not remove it."

"Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation,— the law of love,— extending its sway over the whole of God's dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature."

"Man has wants deeper than can be supplied by wealth or nature or domestic affections. His great relations are to his God and to eternity."

"The movement has indeed been slow, and not such as man would have expected; but it has been analogous to the great movements of God in His providence and in His works. So, if we may credit the geologists, has this earth reached its present state. So have moved on the great empires. So retribution follows crime. So rise the tides. So grows the tree with long intervals of repose and apparent death. So comes on the spring, with battling elements and frequent reverses, with snowbanks and violets, and, if we had no experience, we might be doubtful what the end would be. But we know that back of all this, beyond these fluctuations, away in the serene heavens, the sun is moving steadily on; that these very agitations of the elements and seeming reverses, are not only the sign, but the result of his approach, and that the full warmth and radiance of the summer noontide are sure to come. So, O Divine Redeemer, Sun of Righteousness, come Thou! So will He come. It may be through clouds and darkness and tempest; but the heaven where He is, is serene; He is "traveling in the greatness of His strength; "and as surely as the throne of God abides, we know He shall yet reach the height and splendor of the highest noon, and that the light of millennial glory shall yet flood the earth."

"Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race."

"Who ever heard of a devout deist? Who ever heard of one who was willing to spend his life in missionary labor for the good of others? It is not according to the constitution of the mind that such a system should awaken the affections. And what is true of this system is true of every false system. All such systems leave the heart cold, and, accordingly, exert very little genuine,transforming power over the life."

"The very act of faith by which we receive Christ is an act of the utter renunciation of self, and all its works, as a ground of salvation. It is really a denial of self, and a grounding of its arms in the last citadel into which it can be driven, and is, in its principle, inclusive of every subsequent act of self-denial by which sin is forsaken or overcome."

"You can throw yourselves away. You can become of no use in the universe except for a warning. You can lose your souls. Oh, what a loss is that! The perversion and degradation of every high and immortal power for an eternity! And shall this be true of any one of you? Will you be lost when One has come from heaven, traveling in the greatness of His strength, and with garments dyed in blood, on purpose to guide you home—.home to a Father's house — to an eternal home?"

"Christendom, as an effect, must be accounted for. It is too large for a mortal cause."

"If the Church would have her face shine, she must go up into the mount, and be alone with God. If she would have her courts of worship resound with eucharistic praises, she must open her eyes, and see humanity lying lame at the temple gates, and heal it in the miraculous name of Jesus."

"It appears to me that, even within the recollection of living men, the Christian faith has come to be less and less regarded as a commanding and mighty power from heaven, a voice of authority, a law of holy life, but more and more as an easy going guide to future enjoyment, to a universal happiness and an indiscriminate salvation."

"Holiness is religious principle put into motion. It is the love of God sent forth into circulation, on the feet, and with the hands of love to men. It is faith gone to work. It is charity coined into actions, and devotion breathing benedictions on human suffering, while it goes up in intercession to the Father of all piety."

"Consciously, distinctly, resolutely, habitually, we need to give ourselves, our business, our interests, our families, our affections, into the Spirit's hands, to lead and fashion us as He will. When we work with the current of that Divine will, all is vital, efficient, fruitful."

"There is a test point about you somewhere. Perhaps it is pride; you cannot bear an affront; you will not confess a fault. Perhaps it is personal vanity, ready to sacrifice every thing to display. Perhaps it is a sharp tongue. Perhaps it is some sensual appetite, bent on its unclean gratification. Then you are to gather up your moral forces just here, and, till that darling sin is brought under the practical law of Christ, you are shut out of Christ's kingdom."

"Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat."

"Every impulse and stroke of missionary power on earth is from the heart of Christ. He sows, and there is a harvest. He touches nations, and there arises a brotherhood, not only civilized by His light, but sanctified by His love. The isles of the ocean wait for Him. He spreads His net and gathers of every kind, and lo! the burden of the sea is not only fishes, but fishermen, who go and gather and come again. If there are activity, free giving, ready going, a full treasury, able men who say, " Here am I, send me," it is because through all the organization Christ lives, and His personal Spirit works. There is no other possible spring for that enthusiasm."

"Moral conduct includes every thing in which men are active and for which they are accountable. They are active in their desires, their affections, their designs, their intentions, and in every thing they say and do of choice; and for all these things they are accountable to God."

"The weakest spot in every man is where he thinks himself to be the wisest."

"There is not a single spot between Christianity and atheism, upon which a man can firmly fix his foot."

"Style should be like window-glass, perfectly transparent, and with very little sash."

"Be short in all religious exercises. Better leave the people longing than loathing. No conversion after the first half hour."

"There's a crisis of truth in the pulputs today in our land. That in the name of tolerance, even in the name of love, we are redefining love that is not on God's terms! Jesus is God, there is no other god besides Jesus: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! All the world religions, they can say what they say, there is no other god but Jesus, there is no other standard of truth. Jesus alone is the standard of truth! He defines morality! He defines marriage! He defines life! He defines righteousness! And in our allegiance to Him, we say what He says. It's time to come out in the open. It's time to go public. Regardless what it costs us. We love you, Jesus! The only god!"

"The Second Coming will probably happen within the lifetime of people living today."

"The Harlot Babylon is preparing the nations to receive the Antichrist. The Harlot Babylon will be a religion of affirmation, toleration, no absolutes, a counterfeit justice movement. They will feed the poor, have humanitarian projects, inspire acts of compassion for all the wrong reasons. They won’t know it, beloved they will be sincere, many of them, but their sincerity will not in any way lessen the impact of their deception. The fact that they are sincere does not make their deception less damaging. I believe that one of the main pastors, as a forerunner to the Harlot movement, it’s not the Harlot movement yet, is Oprah. She is winsome, she is kind, she is reasonable, she is utterly deceived, utterly deceived. A classy woman, a cool woman, a charming woman, but has a spirit of deception and she is one of the clear pastors, forerunners to the Harlot movement."

"If there are any other holy writings beside the Bible, then Christianity is reduced to simply another philosophy like Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. To me, Christ and His Word are the only way, the only truth and the only life."

"But today, I look around this auditorium, and there are 50% of you who are significantly overweight, and it’s disgusting!…I’m embarrassed to be around some of you people. I hug you and my hand goes into your sides."

"Revolution was and is in each step and breath of those who dare follow this man called Jesus. Revolution comes about only when there is at least one person willing to take a stand for God and say "the present system" is wrong and thus will not accomplish the purposes of God. All of God's purposes center on His glory and meeting the needs of people. Jesus was the ultimate revolutionary."

"No matter how dynamic a campus work, unless a whole church is "totally committed," the campus ministry's impact would be limited."

"I taught what was clear in Acts 11:26: SAVED = CHRISTIAN = DISCIPLE, simply meaning that you cannot be saved and you cannot be a true Christian without being a disciple also."

"I believe with all my heart that the dream to evangelize the world in this generation will be accomplished by God's power working through his disciples. And to God be the glory!"

"God has a sense of ironic justice. To rid Jacob of his deceitful nature, God placed Jacob under Laban, a worse deceiver. To show me how insensitive and in fact merciless at times I had been to the weak, God placed me ‘under’ upset and – from my point of view – unforgiving brothers who would not give me any mercy or the benefit of the doubt, though I felt I had done so much for them through the years. I felt humiliated through shame and exasperated to the point of considering leaving the Lord. I learned that mercy expressed through kindness, forgiveness and gentleness – was not only God’s way to encourage and strengthen the weak, but the only path to keep a movement together. In all of these trials, my dear wife exemplified how one should love the weak by staying at my side with unconditional love."

"At the end of the lesson, I presented The Crown of Thorns Project. Remember that Jesus said to the faithful Eleven, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Spirit has made Los Angeles the “Jerusalem” of God’s new movement. So to evangelize the world, we must evangelize “our Judea and Samaria,” the United States. In just three years of existence, the SoldOut Movement has planted dynamic discipling churches in the four most influential cities of America – New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC – as well as in Portland, Honolulu, Hilo, Syracuse, Eugene, and Phoenix. These churches do not include several heroic remnant churches. The US congregations [alongside our future first world congregations such as London and Paris] will provide the needed resources – disciples and finances – to go “to the ends of the earth.” Therefore… we must plan to encircle the globe with unified discipling churches on the other five populated continents. Listed are the 12 targeted international cities that when a line is drawn connecting them forms a jagged circle – a redemptive “crown of thorns” – around the world: Santiago, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, London, Paris, Cairo, Johannesburg, Moscow, Chennai, Hong Kong, Manila and Sydney. It was so exciting that during the conference Sasha and Louisa Kostenko of Moscow, Russia and Joe and Kerry Willis of Brisbane, Australia solidified plans to move to LA for strengthening and further training. Of note, Sasha and Louisa were the number three and four baptisms when Elena and I planted the original Moscow Church in 1991. (The Moscow Church saw 850 baptisms in its first year!) In time, Sasha and Louisa married, went into the ministry, and by the year 2001, they led the 11,500 disciples of the 15 nations of the former Soviet Union! As He promised, our God is gathering a remnant from “the farthest horizons.” (Nehemiah 1:8-9) It’s happening!"

"Second is best because God rewards the quest."

"I'm trusting in the Lord and a good lawyer."

"I haven't, in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America ever violated an order - not one."

"I was authorized to do everything that I did."

"Hillary Clinton was for the Iran agreement. And I can't support someone who is for the Iran agreement. ... In my case, I'll be writing in General Colin Powell. That, I think, would be the best person."

"We can't have the president of the United States acting like the drug dealer in chief, giving clean packs of money to a ... state sponsor of terror. Those 500-euro notes will pop up across the Middle East. .... We're going to see problems in multiple (countries) because of that money given to them."

"I have spent my life building bridges and tearing down barriers — not building walls. That’s why I find Donald Trump’s belief that an American-born judge of Mexican descent is incapable of fairly presiding over his case is not only dead wrong, it is un-American. As the Presidential campaign progressed, I was hoping the rhetoric would tone down and reflect a campaign that was inclusive, thoughtful and principled. While I oppose the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump’s latest statements, in context with past attacks on Hispanics, women and the disabled like me, make it certain that I cannot and will not support my party’s nominee for President regardless of the political impact on my candidacy or the Republican Party. It is absolutely essential that we are guided by a commander-in-chief with a responsible and proper temperament, discretion and judgment. Our President must be fit to command the most powerful military the world has ever seen, including an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. After much consideration, I have concluded that Donald Trump has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to assume the greatest office in the world."

"Most responses I have seen to the present crisis are polarized, either dismissing violent jihad as irrelevant to Islam or asserting that all Muslims should be treated as potential threats. In this book, I hope to clarify both the reality of violent jihad in Islam and a compassionate approach to our Muslim neighbors."

"[C]riticism of Islam is often taken to be criticism of Muslims. That is... false. One can criticize the Quranic command to beat disobedient wives without criticizing Muslims. The accusation of Islamophobia... often fails at this point. Islam is not Muslims, and one can criticize Islam while affirming and loving Muslims."

"To answer whether Islam truly is a religion of peace, we must consider what Islam teaches, not just what Muslims practice."

"The church, as an organization interested in self-preservation and in the gain of power, has sometimes found the counsel of the Cross quite as inexpedient as have national and economic groups. In dealing with such major social evils as war, slavery, and social inequality, it has discovered convenient ambiguities in the letter of the Gospels which enabled it to violate their spirit and to ally itself with the prestige and power those evils had gained in their corporate organization. In adapting itself to the conditions of a civilization which its founder had bidden it to permeate with the spirit of divine love, it found that it was easier to give to Caesar the things belonging to Caesar if the examination of what might belong to God were not too closely pressed."

"Men must continue to condemn themselves not only for their failure to do what they could, but also for their failure to perform what they could not, for their denial of the absolute good whose categorical demands were laid upon their incapable will."

"The spirit of Jesus revolted against Jewish class distinctions between the righteous few and the unhallowed many He spoke to the outcast poor of the promise of the kingdom."

"The ideal which was implicit in Jesus’ teaching became explicit in Paul. Not only did this apostle refuse to recognize the religious differences between the parties of Peter, Apollos, Paul, and Christ, but — what is more important — he showed his converts that in Christ there can be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free, and that with God there is no respect of persons. Recognizing the diversity of gifts he resisted the ever-present tendency to find in diversity the excuse of division."

"In Protestant history the sect has ever been the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor, of those who were without effective representation in church or state. ... By its very nature the sectarian type of organization is valid only for one generation. The children born to the voluntary members of the first generation begin to make the sect a church long before they have arrived at the years of discretion."

"Denominations, churches, sects, are sociological groups whose principle of differentiation is to be sought in their conformity to the order of social classes and castes. It would not be true to affirm that the denominations are not religious groups with religious purposes, but it is true that they represent the accommodation of religion to the caste system. They are emblems, therefore, of the victory of the world over the church, of the secularization of Christianity, of the church's sanction of that divisiveness which the church's gospel condemns."

"The monastic movement ... was directed to the achievement of a Christian life, apart from civilization, in obedience to the laws of Christ, and in pursuit of a perfection wholly distinct from the aims that men seek in politics and economics, in sciences and arts."

"The counterpart of such devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a thoroughgoing opposition to the institutions of culture. To Tolstoy these seem to be founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man's present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identification of true life with personal existence, and, above all, the practice of and belief in violence. Even less than Tertullian does he think that human corruption is resident in human nature; the evil with which men contend is in their culture only."

"Tolstoy ... can center his attack on the conscious beliefs, the tangible institutions, and the specious customs of society. He is not content simply to withdraw from these himself and lead a semimonastic life; he becomes a crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ."

"Tolstoy ... believed that property claims were based on robbery and maintained by violence. More radical than second-century radical Christians and than most monks, he turned even against the subdivision of labor in economic society. It seemed to him to be the means by which privileged persons such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher order than workingmen, or that their contribution to society was so great that it compensated for their claims."

"The relation of the authority of Jesus Christ to the authority of culture is such that every Christian must often feel himself claimed by the Lord to reject the word and its kingdoms with their pluralism and temporalism, their makeshift compromises of many interests, their hypnotic obsession by the love of life and the fear of death."

"The movement of withdrawal and renunciation is a necessary element in every Christian life. ... It is an inevitable answer; but it is also inadequate. ... It is inadequate, for one thing, because it affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. Christ claims no man purely as a natural being, but always as one who has become human in a culture; who is not only in culture, but into whom culture has penetrated."

"The Christian .. cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him. ... He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rejecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and beliefs have taken up residence in his mind."

"Radical Christians are always making use of the culture, or parts of the culture, which they ostensibly reject."

"Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious soul as well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is part of them."

"The conservation, selection, and conversion of cultural achievements is not only a fact; it is also a morally inescapable requirement, which the exclusive Christian must meet because he is a Christian and a man. If he is to confess Jesus before men, he must do so by means of words and ideas derived from culture, though a change of meaning is also necessary. ... If he is to say what "love" means he must choose among such words as "eros," "philanthropia" and "agape," or "charity," "loyalty" and "love"—seeking one that comes close to the meaning of Jesus Christ, and modifying it by use in context. These things he must do, not only that he may communicate, but also that he may himself know whom and what he believes. When he undertakes to fulfill the demands of Jesus Christ, he finds himself partly under the necessity of translating into the terms of his own culture what was commanded in the terms of another."

"The difference between the radicals and the other groups is often only this: that the radicals fail to recognize what they are doing, and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world."

"The chief rival to monotheism, I shall contend, is henotheism or that social faith which makes a finite society, whether cultural or religious, the object of trust as well as of loyalty and which tends to subvert even officially monotheistic institutions, such as the churches."

"Faith is at least as much an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of God as sense experience is an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of natural entities."

"Faith and God belong together somewhat as sense experience and physical reality do."

"Everyone with any experience of life is aware of the extent to which the characters of people he has known have been given their particular forms by the sufferings through which they have passed. But it is not simply what has happened to them that has defined them; their responses to what has happened to them have been of even greater importance, and these responses have been shaped by their interpretations of what they suffered."

"It is part of the meaning of suffering that it is that which cuts athwart our purposive movements. It represents the denial from beyond ourselves of our movement toward pleasure; or it is the frustration of our movement toward self-realization or toward the actualization of our potentialities."

"Because suffering is the exhibition of the presence in our existence of that which is not under our control, or of the intrusion into our self-legislating existence of an activity operating under another law than ours, it cannot be brought adequately within the spheres of teleological and deontological ethics, the ethics of man-the-maker, or man-the-citizen."

"There can be no mistake more inexcusable and fatal than to doubt, disobey, or neglect the Bible."

"He is cunning, he is mighty, he never rests, he is ever plotting the downfall of the child of God; and if the child of God relaxes in prayer the Devil will succeed in ensnaring him."

"When people click [on porn], they’re contributing to sex trafficking, they’re contributing to STDs, they’re contributing to people who are mostly alcohol to drug addicts. … most of these girls that enter porn do not really have an education … most of the girls don’t come from, like, healthy families, where they have a healthy self-esteem. … You don’t want people to think you’re weak when you’re in porn; you wanna act like you love it and you love rough stuff, and you love being violated, and called degrading names. It’s all just a pack of lies. People do porn because they need the money, and most of them don’t have other options or education."

"I would like to dedicate this book to the hundreds of women and men who died in the porn industry from AIDS, suicide, homicide and drug related deaths. Your voices will be heard now."

"The truth is there is no fantasy in porn. It’s all an illusion. A closer look into the hardcore scenes of a porn star’s life will show you an act the porn industry doesn’t want you to see. The real truth is we porn actresses want to end the shame and trauma of our box office lives but we can’t do it alone. We need you men to fight for our freedom and give us back our honor. We need you to hold us in your strong arms while we sob tears over our deep wounds and begin to heal. We want you to throw out our movies and help piece together the shattered fragments of our lives. We need you to pray for us so God will hear and repair our ruined lives. Don’t believe the big top fantasy. Porn is nothing more than fake sex, bruises and lies on video."

"Damaged little girls are exactly what the porn industry preys upon and depends upon. It is estimated that 90% of porn performers are sexual abuse survivors and the average age of a porn actress is 22.8 years old."

"The porn industry was never supposed to happen this way. But 1 out of 4 Americans made it happen. While women and men in porn destroyed themselves with drugs, alcohol and suicide we sat idly by at our computers with “popcorn” in one hand and our mouse in the other greedily clicking away at their lives. May God forgive our evil."

"Guys there started ... laughing. I asked what they were looking at and they told me it was one of their wives posing topless. Out of nowhere I got really angry and I said I would hope that when I'm married that my husband would not be passing around pictures of me topless or nude. Everybody started laughing, but the guy to my left said when I get married I wouldn't show pictures like that to anyone. I was in shock! Later on that day, he and I started talking. He asked me what I did for a living. I said modeling. He asked me what kind and kept prying. Eventually I told him I did pornography. He said he knew already and that my boyfriend had told the guys and then he asked me if I believed in God. I told him yes and he proceeded to preach the Gospel to me. I started crying and he asked me if I wanted to rededicate my life. I said yes. [After that], I didn't do any more shoots and stopped accepting any income from pornogrpahy."

"I didn’t have a relationship with my family, I didn’t have a close relationship with anybody. When people said I was good enough to do porn, I thought I guess I should. Anything I did that was sexually acting out, all of that is because I longed for purpose and meaning. It’s hard for me to get back in my own head because my thinking back then was so irrational, I thought no one cared about me. And I wanted to please these men. … I had a revelation of God and it changed everything. I had to leave the industry, immediately. … Part of my dream has come true, to get married and have a normal life. After all the things I’ve been through, I would never imagine my life like this. I probably sound younger, but I honestly feel like my life has just begun. … Women are getting lured in, sometimes for money, some are single moms or going to school, but they aren’t thinking about what happens down the road. If you think about what your life is going to be after, you wouldn’t make the choice to get into it. That’s what makes me a good fit for the job that I’m in. I’m a survivor."

"I am an . I believe the Bible is God’s inspired word. I believe that Jesus is God in the flesh who died for the sins of the world and rose again bodily on the third day. And yet, according to Ken Ham in his historic debate with Bill Nye tonight at the , because of my belief in Evolution, I cannot be who I am. I cannot be both a follower of Jesus Christ and someone who believes in the evidence presented by the vast majority of scientists worldwide. Or at least, it is a very unlikely fit. Even though I insist on a model that includes God as the beginning point, the uncaused cause of the universe. Even though I affirm all of the core doctrines of the Christian faith and even though I have had an undeniable experience with Jesus Christ, according to Ken Ham, it must be difficult for me to be a Christian. I am deceived and adhering to one of the greatest Satanic lies ever created. All because I believe what the majority of people on planet earth do — that our beautiful planet is millions of years old and that all of life has common origins and undergoes a process of evolution that helps us to adapt, progress, and survive. Makes sense…"

"Those of us in the Evangelical world understand that Ken Ham represents a very small minority of Christians worldwide. The amount of Christ followers that believe in his version of creationism is waning and the reality seems to be that most millennial Christians are discovering balance between scientific fact and the experience of our faith. These are very exciting times. But tonight, thousands upon thousands tuned in to watch Ken Ham speak for “Christianity” or at least “Evangelical Christianity”, both of which I identify with. Thousands upon thousands were exposed to a man who can barely be called a scientist let alone a theologian who represented the perspective of Christianity against Bill Nye’s scientific agnosticism."

"For me, tonight’s debate was incredibly troubling. As I sat and heard Ken Ham argue that belief in evolution can lead to abortion, euthanasia, and killing our grandparents, I felt like beating our heads against the wall."

"Because the version of Christian faith that Ken Ham espoused tonight is not the version of Christianity that I am a part of. Ham’s understanding of what it means that the Bible is God’s inspired word is very different from what that phrase means to me. The presupposition that Ken Ham built his entire argument against Evolution on — that the Bible is God’s inerrant science textbook — is one that the majority of Christians and even Evangelicals reject. I was troubled because tonight it seemed like Ken Ham became the official spokesperson for Christians worldwide. But let me be very clear, Ken Ham does not speak for me or my faith."

"The Jesus I worship doesn’t offer me scientific explanations about the world around me. The Jesus I worship is the being through which all things were created, seen and unseen. He is the Lord of the sciences. He is the creator of the Evolutionary process. My Jesus doesn’t demand that I believe one theory or another about the origins of life. My Jesus is more concerned with the content of our characters and how we love each other than with our position on any scientific, political, or even theological issue. [...] My faith is one that embraces doubt, questioning, exploration, discovery, and science. My faith is not rooted in any doctrine or idea but in a relationship with the God of love. And so when Ken Ham and those of his ilk stand up and proclaim that Evolution and modern science is “opposed to God”, I am left to wonder which God he’s talking about. Because the God I know and worship has always been able to withstand my questions. He is the God who I believe is behind all scientific discovery. But apparently, Ken’s God is not. Instead, the God Ken seems to represent has apparently given us all of the answers to the mysteries of the universe in the Bible and expects us to cease thinking, exploring, and learning. Because the Bible says, we are to believe it, and that settles it. My understanding of God is one that makes God far more expansive than that. My understanding is that the creations of our amazing God go far beyond our ability to comprehend. We will also be discovering. Science will always have new questions to answer. And the more we find out, the more we will be left speechless as we behold the glory of our universe."

"Yes, I am an Evangelical Christian. I believe the Bible. And I also believe that our earth was created through a process called Evolution. None of these notions contradict. In fact, these all together actually enrich my faith. Evolution causes me to stand in awe before the amazing Creator of the Universe and worship him for his majesty and creativity. And on this, I differ greatly from Ken Ham. Ham does not speak for me nor does he speak for the faith of the vast majority of Christians worldwide. To my non-Christian friends, please understand this. Please know that Christian faith does not automatically equal and anti-knowledge. In fact, for many of us, I think that kind of faith is one that is inherently contradictory to our understanding of who our God is."

"We are now teaching tolerance to something as vile as homosexuality – even to our grade-school children. This demon has been released to infect our generation. No matter what is said or claimed, most homosexuals are not happy, because there is something programmed in us by Jehovah God himself that makes us inherently know good from evil. This demon will not give peace, that’s why there is so much drug addiction and suicide in the gay community. It’s an antiGod, anti-procreation agenda of the Devil, and we have glamorized it. Now when we do evil, we find a way to make it acceptable. So, the majority have been pushed in the closet while we put up with the blatant display of perverted, vile behavior that is being taught to our children. Instead of the church gathering fire to help these poor souls get delivered, they have been accepted and given free rein in the church. The infestation is increasing because these people release these spirits in the church and in our schools to infect others. You cannot love, counsel or drug a demon. We have been caged!"

"Thank you CNN and let me know when y'all need some of them demons cast out of you. I will gladly oblige. You will feel a lot better. Keep up the good work."

"Big Tech is censoring Experts and suppressing the CURE. I will not be silenced."

"I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came, I don't know which country she comes from, but she's said that she's had tremendous success with hundreds of patients, and I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her."

"We have an obligation to make sure Afghans looking to come to the United States are who they say they are and that their stories check out before – not after – they arrive in our country. That is not a radical or "xenophobic" proposition; it’s just common-sense and vital to our national security. Bringing hundreds of thousands of foreigners from a terrorist hotbed into the U.S. now and asking questions later is simply reckless and irresponsible. The stakes are high. We must get this right."

"We've seen a parade of multinational corporations, financial institutions, Hollywood actors, and even American sports superstars joining a shameless stampede to see who can pander most effectively to a regime that is the reigning world champion of predatory economic behavior, human rights abuses, and even genocide."

"I’m incredibly close to my family and I think family is such an important thing, in Asian culture especially. This really spoke to me personally, but hopefully the audience will resonate with that as well. Not only Asian audiences, but also audiences from all over the world, everyone and anything can relate to the unconditional love that you share among a family and between family members. No family is perfect. We all have our differences, misunderstandings, and ups and downs. I hope people can see that we are who we are because of our family and because of our ancestry, and respect that."

"I’m not physically a super expressive person. I think I’m pretty put-together."

"All I ever wanted in my life as an actor was a safe, exploratory environment to just play and act, without being worried about if it’s going to turn out alright on camera, what the box office is going to be, what is the press going to say, what’s the review going to be like. Acting in its purest form."

"When I was a teenager in Georgia, I always felt like the odd one. I never felt like I fit in. My dad and I would go to Blockbuster and look for Asian films and we could never find any. If we saw a Jackie Chan movie, we would watch that because it was so comforting to see a face similar to ours."

"America has taken small baby steps of progress towards having more inclusion and diversity in Hollywood. It's optimistic. I'm hopeful, but there is so much more work that needs to be done."

"Even while filming we knew how important it was that we get this opportunity to showcase our culture and our uniqueness, but also, as human beings, our stories, our emotions, and, at the end of the day, our humanity."

"I wanted to break boundaries for myself as an actor, where it's not to tell the story and do a good job, but to go to another level where I feel free."

"In China, literally in elementary school, we have to sit a certain way. You can't raise your hand anytime, you can’t speak in class. So, it takes a lot of courage and experimenting to kind of try to break that."

"It was important not only to me personally, but also for all of us who were involved, that it sets an example of Asian excellence for a more prominent presence in Hollywood, and also globally."

"When I worked in Asia for a long time, I just felt like I needed a break. I needed to relearn everything about myself and unlearn a lot of things."

"I learned so much about myself that I didn't know prior. You're just constantly outputting, and giving all you know so you don't have time to look inside of yourself and to really reflect. The four years at drama school really gave me that time and space. I got to know myself much better, I think as not only as an actor, but as a person. I was reassured about my passion for acting. I was more confident coming out of drama school."

"My first time visiting church I went up to the altar and said the prayer of salvation. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I was hungry for more. I longed for this love that people said Jesus offered. The most amazing thing about my journey for the next 3 years (before I would finally get freed from the industry and healed from my brokenness) is that Jesus used people in my life to continue steering me towards Him. There are no barriers or obstacles for God. God will use anything or anyone to fulfill His plan. I gave Him permission to work in my life that one day at the altar call and He fought for me daily. […] Now looking back I can see how God is waiting for us to make choices that give Him permission to work in our lives, if we are willing. He gives us the freewill to choose Him, or not. It was my choice to go to church, accept Him into my heart, read the bible, and pray and all of this God honored and used for my good. […] I have joy and peace knowing His word is real and true. He loved me the same when I was a broken prostitute, suicidal porn star. He never left me."

"I started seeking God every day. I would worship, pray, and read the Bible. Through that, God healed me and made me a brand new woman. He completely restored my soul."

"First and foremost, do not be ashamed of your addiction. This is a huge attack Satan places on the body of Christ because if you’re ashamed of your sin then you won’t ask for help. Therefore, you battle it alone and isolation is a dangerous place to be, because isolation gives Satan an open door to attack your mind."

"Scholars who classify the Gospels as “fiction” generally hold that the Gospel authors were intentionally writing fiction and assumed their work would be read as such. There is no consensus among scholars within this camp as to what exact kind of fiction the Gospels are intended to be. Candidates include ...“legend,” (R. M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2003), 21.)"

"Many scholars find strong parallels between Raglan’s “hero myth” analysis and the Jesus story of the New Testament. [...] Price goes even further when he argues that “every detail of the [Christ] story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over.” From this Price surmises that it is “arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying in back of the myth.”"

"Robert Price goes so far as to argue that every aspect of the Jesus story found in the Gospels fits the “mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over.” With such a strong correspondence between Jesus and universally acknowledged mythic figures, the suggestion that the Jesus story is rooted in history while the other hero stories are not seems highly implausible to some."

"If Jesus performed the feats attributed to him in the Gospels, should we not expect that he would have caught the attention of at least a few pagan writers? Instead, some scholars argue, we find little or no mention of Jesus outside the New Testament. For some—especially the most radical fringe of legendary-Jesus theorists (viz. group 1 [inclusive of Christ myth theorists])—this suggests the miracle-working figure of the Gospels is purely a legend, essentially no different from the mythological savior figures of other ancient mystery religions."

"[Per G. A. Wells and Earl Doherty] the Gospels later created a historical narrative around Paul’s mythological savior figure and thereby transformed him into a historical person. (G. A. Wells, The Jesus myth (Chicago:Open Court, 1999), esp. 95-111; E. Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Pub., 1999).)"

"Christ myth theorists argue that Paul views Jesus as a cosmic savior figure, along the lines of a mystery-religion deity, not a historical person in the recent past. They argue that it was only later, when the Gospels were written, that a fictitious historical narrative was imposed on this mythical cosmic savior figure."

"You can and you can't—You shall and you shan't—You will and you won't—And you will be damned if you do—And you will be damned if you don't."

"Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs."

"Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?"

"Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved."

"By masochism I do not mean that they (masochists) get their sexual jollies out of physical pain, but simply that in some strange way they are chronically self-destructive. Masochists are people who perpetually attempt to destroy themselves. They are always, in one way or another, trying to kill themselves. In the long run they almost always succeed. Our task in therapy is to help them empty themselves of their masochism so that life may fill them instead. The problem of masochism is intimately tied up with the problem of responsibility. Masochists are people who, because they hate themselves, believe that they are worthless and deserve only punishment. They are self-destructive because they lack the capacity to assume responsibility for their own lives. Instead of taking care of themselves, they neglect themselves, abuse themselves, and in the end destroy themselves. The genuinely disciplined person, on the other hand, is one who takes responsibility for his or her own life and well-being. Discipline is self-caring. Masochism is not. Discipline is love translated into action; masochism is love turned against the self."

"Laymen tend to associate sadism and masochism with purely sexual activity, thinking of them as the sexual enjoyment derived from inflicting or receiving physical pain. Actually, true sexual sadomasochism is a relatively uncommon form of psychopathology. Much, much more common, and ultimately more serious, is the phenomenon of social sadomasochism, in which people unconsciously desire to hurt and be hurt by each other through their nonsexual interpersonal relations."

"Most people who seek psychotherapy are suffering from a sense of personal inadequacy. Yet there are always a few whose problem is just the opposite: they suffer because they cannot accept their greatness. Perhaps ten percent of my patients have had to come to terms not with their inferiority but with their superiority. To accept one's legitimate talents without guilt or fear is as much a responsibility as to accept one's faults."

"It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn."

"There are a number of different theological models of evil ... This book will concern itself solely with the subject of human evil, and its primary focus will be on 'bad people'."

"It would, I believe, be quite appropriate to classify evil people as constituting a specific variant of the narcisstic personality disorder."

"The time is right, I believe, for psychiatry to recognize a distinct new type of personality disorder to encompass those I have named evil. In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, this one would specifically be distinguished by: (a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behaviour, which may often be quite subtle. (b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury. (c) pronounced concern with a public image and self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives. d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophreniclike disturbance of thinking at times of stress."

"This is a dangerous book."

"Who in the hell is Satan? I don't know."

"The spirit of evil is one of unreality, but it itself is real. To think otherwise is to be misled."

"If we attempt te deal with (human) evil by destroying it, we will also end up destroying ourselves, spiritually if not physcially. And we are likely to take some innocent people with us as well."

"Evil can be thought of as the exercise of political power — that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid extending oneself for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth."

"I have come to suspect that many cases of schizophrenia may in fact be the result of evil being passed from parents to children ... it is possible that some children, faced with the choice of either becoming evil themselves or utterly losing their minds, choose the latter. Evil is contagious. The children of the evil are often damaged for life."

"My favorite definition of evil is that it is militant ignorance."

"Evil is that force ... residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness."

"It is not the weak or the stupid who are most likely to be the targets of evil, but the strong and the good. Evil seeks to destroy the life force wherever it is most manifest."

"It has often seemed to me that those who are most dedicated to the light are the ones most subject to assault by the forces of darkness. Evil always hates the light. And yet these attacks are not necessarily destructive. In the long run they may serve the purposes of grace. For through them the servants of the light may become more firmly committed to their cause, their dedication tested and refined."

"While Eastern religions have a far more developed understanding of spiritual growth, they have paid comparatively little attention to the phenomenon of human evil."

"Lying is both a cause and a manifestation of evil."

"Compartmentalization is not the root of all evil; it is, however, the principal psychological mechanism of evil. Deprive an evil man of his capacity to compartmentalize, and he will be like a general without an army. Or better yet, he will undergo a conversion to goodness — a conversion to integrity."

"Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent."

"Satan has no power except in a human body."

"The only power that Satan has is through human belief in its lies."

"The reality of the matter is that the naming of evil is still in a primitive stage."

"I know no more accurate epithet for Satan than the Father of Lies."

"... As (Malachi) Martin points out, it is terribly important to understand that Satan is a spirit. I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible in the way that matter is tangible. It no more has horns, hooves, and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something bascially nameless... It is spirit."

"The only real route to peace is through self-purification. We must purge ourselves of our own pride, our need to control, and our unwillingness to suffer for the sake of others. Peacemaking begins inside each of us."

"The problem of evil is perhaps the most fundamental of all human problems. True community is always in a state of almost constant terror at the problem of human evil."

"In any case, in Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril."

"At one point I allowed myself to become involved in a project called the Peace Train. It started as a fine idea but soon began to acquire all the trappings of a cult. People were surrendering their critical judgment to the leaders and suppressing their differences for the sake of an emotional high. When I recognized what was happening, I pulled out. I had no desire to become a guru, nor to see community used as a means of control. The Peace Train itself turned out to be terribly boring. What passed for excitement was mostly posturing. I found myself dreading the meetings and relieved when it finally came to an end."

"You may remember that The Road Less Travelled opened with the sentence "Life is difficult." And to that great truth, I will now add another translation: Life is complex."

"It occurred to him (Carl Jung) that it was perhaps no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as ‘spirits’, and that perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder or, better yet, a spiritual condition."

"One issue where Christian theology and the New Age movement tend to part company radically concerns the issue of evil. Christian doctrine holds that evil is real. Eastern religions do not consider it to be real. They consider it to be illusion or false knowledge, what they call maya. I do not claim there is nothing to this view. There is no doubt in my mind that by thinking of evil we can create it. If we read the demonic into everything with which we disagree – as many Stage Two religious folk are prone to do – then we will cause fragmentation and hostility rather than healing. Through the New Age movement, however, the simplistic idea has spread that if we could just change our thinking, we would realise there’s no such thing as evil in the world. It would all just go away, vanish. But the reality is that there really are people out there who like to maim, to torture, and to crush other people. There are people who want war because they profit from war. And you can get into serious trouble if you believe that there aren’t. Because sooner or later you will be accosted with real evil, and dealing with it will not be as easy as some New Age books imply."

"The one New Age book that has attracted the most attention, and the one that I am most often asked about, is A Course in Miracles. It is a very good book, filled with a lot of first-rate psychiatric wisdom. But A Course in Miracles also denies the reality of evil, saying that evil is unreal, a kind of figment of our imagination. This is not all that far from the truth, because evil does have a great deal to do with unreality. In fact, in my book People of the Lie, I defined Satan as ‘a real spirit of unreality’. So evil does have a great deal to do with unreality — that is, with lies and untruth. But that doesn’t mean that it in itself doesn’t exist. While A Course in Miracles purports to be Christian, it distorts Christian doctrine. It is not all the truth; rather, it is a half-truth, and in failing to deal with the problem of evil, it leaves out a major part of the picture. It runs with only one side of the ‘paradox’ of evil."

"There are also, I believe, good addictions of a sort, and I have been blessed (or cursed) by one of them: an addiction to consciousness."

"I see no value whatsover in unconstructive suffering."

"One of the major dilemmas we face both as individuals and as a society is simplistic thinking — or the failure to think at all. It is not just a problem, it is the problem."

"If all the energy required to think seems troublesome, the lack of thinking causes far more trouble and conflict for ourselves as individuals and for the society in which we live."

"From my practice as a psychiatrist and my experience and observations in general, I have become familiar with the common errors related to the failure to think well. One, of course, is simply not thinking. Another is making assumptions in thinking, through the use of one-dimensional logic, stereotypes, and labelling. Another problem is the belief that thinking and communication don’t require much effort. Another is assuming that thinking is a waste of time, which is a particular factor in the quiet rage we experience around the failure to solve many social problems."

"... For the most part, we tend to label for the wrong reasons. When we use labelling to make assumptions and unjustly discriminate against others - or to make excuses for ourselves - we infer broader qualities about a person or a situation without the information necessary to support our conclusions. Sometimes, the consequences can be destructive not only to others but to ourselves."

"I believe that all psychological disorders are bascially disorders of consciousness. They are not rooted in the unconscious but in a conscious mind that refuses to think and is unwilling to deal with certain issues, bear certain feelings, or tolerate pain. These issues, feelings , or desires are in the unconscious only because a pain-avoiding conscious mind has thrust them there."

"... Thinking and consciousness are inextricably locked together in a parallel relationship. Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking, and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness. Anytime there is a failure in thinking, there is a corresponding deficit in a person’s level of consciousness. Thus, all human behavior—the good, the bad, and the indifferent—is determined by the extent, or lack thereof, of the quality of thinking and consciousness involved."

"Radical thinkers are also independent thinkers."

"Again and again all of the great religions tell us that the path away from narcissism is the path toward meaning in life."

"I believe that the differences between those who are actively religious or spiritual and those who are not are generally not so much random as developmental."

"I want to scream this from the rooftops: ‘All symptoms are overdetermined.’ Except that I want to expand it way beyond psychiatry. I want to expand it to almost everything. I want to translate it, ‘Anything of any significance is overdetermined. Everything worth thinking about has more than one cause.’ Repeat after me: ‘For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.’ … Because we assume there is a reason for everything, we go looking for it when we should be looking for them."

"Almost as horrific as evil itself is the denial of it, as in the case of those who go through life wearing rose-coloured glasses."

"The mystery of goodness is greater than that of evil."

"Whenever someone is bold enough to ask me, ‘Dr. Peck, what is human nature?’ my first answer is likely to be ‘Human nature is to go to the bathroom in your pants.’ ... If there is a good relationship between the child and the parent, and if the parent is not too impatient or overcontrolling (and unfortunately, these favorable conditions are often not met, which is the major reason that we psychiatrists are so interested in toilet training), then something quite wonderful happens."

"In my practice as a psychotherapist, I would routinely tell my patients, "Psychotherapy is not about happiness; it is about power. If you go the whole route here, I cannot guarantee that you will leave one jot happier. What I can guarantee you is that you will leave more competent"."

"The individual with a secular consciousness essentially thinks that he is the center of the universe. Such people tend to be quite intelligent. They know full well that they are but one of six billion human beings scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet that is a small fragment of a tiny solar system within a galaxy among countless galaxies, and that each of those other human beings also thinks that he is the center of the universe. Consequently, intelligent though they may be, people with a secular consciousness are prone to feel a bit lost within this hugeness and, despite their "centrality," to often experience a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance. The person with a sacred consciousness, on the other hand, does not think of himself as the center of the universe. For him the center resides elsewhere, specifically in God — in the Sacred. Yet despite this lack of centrality, he is actually less likely to feel himself insignificant or meaningless than the secularist is, because he sees himself existing in relationship with that Sacred Other, and it is from this relationship that he derives his meaning and significance. Sometimes people fall in between, with one foot planted in sacred consciousness and the other in secular consciousness..."

"Yet despite all the hype with which the candidates and the press and the networks attempt to create an entertaining spectacle out of politics, we must try to remember that politics is real. It should not be the drama of images. It is the drama of reality. Millions, billions of real lives are at stake."

"... It is common for consciousness to be treated almost as it were a common cold, contagious or potentially deadly if one spreads deep thinking too much to those in one's environment.... Being aware is often greeted with suspicion and trepidation..."

"When I wrote The Road Less Travelled, I never gave a definition of maturity, but I did describe in the book a number of immature people. It seems to me that what most characterizes immature people is that they sit around complaining that life does not meet their demands. On the other hand, what characterizes those relative few who are fully mature is that they see life as their responsibility — even as an opportunity to meet its demands. Indeed, when we realize that everything that happens to us has been designed to teach us what we need to know on our journey of life, we begin to see life from a totally different perspective."

"I wrote of this in People of the Lie. Using My Lai as a case study, I demonstrated how evil at an institutional and group level occurs when there is a fragmentation of consciousness – and conscience."

"... We also need to become increasingly conscious to identify and relish what is good and beautiful in this life."

"It can be argued that one reason many view evil as more prevalent than ever is a result of the fact that our standards have improved."

"Liberation theology proclaims that Christians are called to play an active role in doing battle with the systemic sins and evils of society – called to take responsibility for liberating people from the burdens of poverty and oppression... As (Tom) Langford points out, people who focus exclusively on liberation become fanatic and glum..."

"Paraphrase: The observant and thoughtful among us will have noticed that evil is by far the more common phenomenon. Genuine goodness is rare."

"Paraphrase: There is no virtue inherent in unconstructive suffering. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. If we can be open to learning from our pain, then we are truly growing; if we merely wallow in it, we are not."

"Paraphrase: We live in a profoundly mysterious universe, and it is a universe in which we are constantly being called to grow."

"Paraphrase: If masochism is as common as it seems to be, then it should not surprise us that human evil exists."

"Paraphrase: Since the primary characteristic of evil is laziness, and since laziness is so common, it is obvious that evil is commonplace."

"Paraphrase: Evil is actively opposed to love. It is not laziness but militant refusal. It is anti-love."

"Paraphrase: Evil originates in failure to acknowledge one’s own pain and sin."

"Paraphrase: I actually think that most people are consciously evil and unconsciously good. I can kind of explain why people are consciously evil, but find it much harder to explain why they are unconsciously good."

"Paraphrase: Evil may be thought of as a failure to complete the Oedipal process."

"Paraphrase: The successful resolution of the Oedipal situation permits the growth of love beyond the family; failure to resolve it results in dependency, narcissism, and immaturity in one’s capacity to love."

"Paraphrase: Evil is the complete absence of self-development. It is the refusal to undergo the suffering required for growth. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Evil, however, is an active failure to love. It is not merely a sin of omission but of commission. The evil are people who refuse to acknowledge their own failures, who instead place the burden of their sins upon others and thereby destroy others in order to preserve their own self-image of perfection. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it."

"Paraphrase: Evil has no depth. It is not creative. It is not even in the least bit interesting. It is boring. It is banal."

"Paraphrase: In theological language evil is not just a defect but a real spirit of unreality. It is that which refuses to acknowledge reality, to acknowledge truth; it is, therefore, a form of unconsciousness."

"Paraphrase: Hannah Arendt has written of the ‘banality of evil.’ She was speaking of the Nazi bureaucrats who performed their monstrous duties with the same bland efficiency as they would any other job. It is a fitting phrase. Evil is banal. It is utterly unoriginal. It is simply the absence of love."

"Paraphrase: Many people, because they have not successfully resolved the Oedipal stage, remain emotionally children; they are afraid to grow up, afraid to risk independence, afraid to risk real love."

"Without a recovery process, it is easy to slide into toxic anger, despair, cynicism, and more."

"Grace is God’s radical, unconditional love for all humanity and all creation."