"My work is a very peculiar [unique] one; in many respects it has, and can have no precedent. It may be called an experiment; to a certain extent it is so. And by God’s help it shall be, as it is being, faithfully made."

"Many there are who fail to see that there can be but one lord, and that those who do not make GOD Lord of all do not make Him Lord at all."

"Let us give up our work, our thoughts, our plans, ourselves, our lives, our loved ones, our influence, our all, right into His hand, and then, when we have given all over to Him, there will be nothing left for us to be troubled about, or to make trouble about."

"Let there be no reservation; give yourselves up fully and wholly to Him whose you are and whom you wish to serve in this work; and then there can be no disappointment."

"Let but faithful labourers be found, who will prove faithful to God, and there is no reason to fear that God will not prove faithful to them."

"It will not do to say that you have no special call to go to China. With these facts before you and with the command of the Lord Jesus to go and preach the gospel to every creature, you need rather to ascertain whether you have a special call to stay at home."

"It was no vain or unintelligent act when, knowing the land, its people and climate, I laid my dear wife and the darling children with myself on the altar for this service."

"It needs the presence of special difficulties to manifest to all the workings of God’s mighty power, and for such difficulties we may and should be grateful, and not cast down."

"It is not lost time to wait upon God!"

"If you want blessing, make room for it."

"If we could offer to the ungodly a worldly plan which would ensure their prospering in all that they undertake, how eagerly they would embrace it! And yet when GOD Himself reveals an effectual plan to His people how few avail themselves of it!."

"If we are faithful to GOD in little things, we shall gain experience and strength that will be helpful to us in the more serious trials of life."

"If this is a real work for God it is a real conflict with Satan."

"If there was more true abiding in Christ, there would be less selfish abiding at home."

"If I had a thousand pounds, China should have it. If I had a thousand lives, China should have them. No! not China, but Christ. Can we do too much for Him?"

"If I am guided by God, in going out, He will open the way and provide the means."

"If God try our faith it is to show His faithfulness, and we shall lose the blessing by appeals etc."

"I wish sometimes that I had twenty bodies, that at twenty places at once I might publish the saving name of Jesus."

"I said, ‘You are now placed in a position to help the Chinese as you have never been before. They see that your being a foreigner is now no protection, but increases your danger. Let them see that you are rejoicing in God . . . that you do not need any other protection and that you do not go away, although you might; that you put your trust in God, and are prepared either to suffer or be delivered as He sees best, will learn that there is something in the Gospel worth risking life for.’ What was the result? In almost every place where there were native Christians they grew (in spiritual maturity) as never before."

"I . . . know how much easier it is to lean on an arm of flesh than on the Lord; but I have learned too how much less safe it is."

"I have never passed a more anxious or trying month in my life, but I never felt God so present with me."

"I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done."

"I could not think that GOD was poor, that He was short of resources, or unwilling to supply any want of whatever work was really His. It seemed to me that if there were lack of funds to carry on work, then to that degree, in that special development, or at that time, it could not be the work of GOD."

"I besought Him to give me some work for Him, as an outlet for love and gratitude; some self-denying service, no matter what it might be, however trying or however trivial"

"I believe we are all in danger of accumulating – it may be from thoughtlessness, or from pressure of occupation – things which would be useful to others, while not needed by ourselves, and the retention of which entails loss of blessing."

"I am in great straits for funds. I am happy about it. The Lord may take away all our troublesome people through it and give us true-hearted ones instead."

"I almost wish I had a hundred bodies; they should all be devoted to my Savior in the missionary cause."

"How sadly possible it is to delight in the rest of faith while forgetful to fight the good fight; to dwell upon the cleansing and the purity effected by faith, but to have little thought for the poor souls struggling in the mire of sin."

"All God's giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them"

"We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."

"We have six of the most distinguished people in the field on the committee, but you'll just have to take my word for it because I'm not allowed to disclose their names."

"When you are in the future, the past looks different."

"The honours system gets to grade people. Graded grains make finer rice."

"In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth."

"I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people."

"The reputation of the hangman in the three-piece suit is not what it once was. During and after the war, he was considered a hero, a selfless, sober and self-effacing servant of the crown performing an unpleasant duty with no interest in profit or fame. More recent research and evidence — and changing attitudes towards capital punishment — suggest he was something very different: a callous, self-important brute, who claimed to be motivated by sacred impulses (as many killers do), fastidiously recorded his trail of death (ditto), relished his own macabre notoriety (ditto), killed several innocent people and went on hanging people, without remorse, long after he had concluded capital punishment was not a deterrent. He quit not from moral scruple but over money. He was not mentally ill, like many of his victims, just entirely loathsome."

"The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off."

"All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment, convince me that in what I have done, I have not prevented a single murder."

"When Billy found he scarce could stand, "Help, help!" he cried, and stretch'd his hand, To faithful Henry calling: Quoth Hal, "My friend, I'm sorry for't; 'Tis not my practice to support A minister that's falling.""

"I went to Frankfort and got drunk With that most learn'd Professor Brunck: I went to Wortz and got more drunken With that more learn'd Professor Ruhnken."

"Here lies a Doctor of Divinity, Who was a Fellow too of Trinity; He knew as much about Divinity As other Fellows do of Trinity."

"A little garden little Jowett made, And fenced it with a little palisade; A little taste hath little Dr. Jowett; This little garden doth a little show it."

"Who's up ?" inquired Burke of a friend at the door, "Oh, no one," says Paddy, "tho' Pitt's on the floor."

"To a gentleman, who, at the close of a fierce dispute with Porson, exclaimed, "My opinion of you is most contemptible, Sir"; he retorted, "I never knew an opinion of yours that was not contemptible.""

"Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class "victims" of imaginary wrongs."

"We are a rugged species, up for anything the universe can throw at us; and as the great gloominaries knew, we will be immeasurably better prepared for nasty surprises if we approach the universe realistically - pessimistically - than if we continue to peer out at our surroundings through a distorting, rose-colored prism of wish-fulfillment fantasy."

"Unbelievers may think - all right, we do think - Christianity is only slightly less nutty than Islam; but Christianity is ours. We've got along with it for several centuries; and the relationship between Western unbelievers and Western Christians, if not always polite, is stable and comfortable. Can we fit Islam in like that?"

"All religions look wacky to an unbeliever, even to one who does not, like the celebrity atheists, consider religion a menace. Islam, in its present frustrated state, is doing more harm than most, but that's historically contingent."