Christian Leaders

"July 29, 1869. — Went two and a half hours west to village of Ponda, where a head Arab, called by the natives 'Tipo Tipo' lives; bis name is Hamid bin Mohammed bin Juma Borajib. He presented a goat, a piece of white calico, and four big bunches of beads, also a bag of holens sorghum, and apologized because it was so little."

"The islands above the falls are covered with foliage as beautiful as can be seen anywhere. Viewed from the mass of rock which overhangs the fall, the scenery was the loveliest I had seen."

"No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."

"People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice."

"The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our minds."

"Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due."

"The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians."

"The enemies of Freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot."

"Racialism is a superstitious variety of nationalism. A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours."

"There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better.""

"Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive."

"When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: "My dear, we live in an age of transition.""

"On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except the fact that they are so."

"Looking back, I think I can separate the years when I was happy and those when I was unhappy. But perhaps at the time I should have judged differently."

"There are of course no beginnings or ends in history. We may walk for a few miles by the side of a river, noting its shadows and its rapids, the gorges which confine it and the plains through which it meanders; but we know that we have seen neither the beginning nor the end of its course, that the whole river has an unbroken continuity, and that sections, whether of space or time, are purely arbitrary. We are always sowing our future; we are always reaping our past."

"So the pendulum swings, now violently, now slowly; and every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival."

"I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour."

"I believe that the accumulated experience of mankind, and his wonderful discoveries, are of great value. I only point out that they do not constitute real-progress in human nature itself,..."

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

"Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal."

"The fruit of the tree of knowledge, always drives man from some paradise or other."

"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."

"It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally."

"Patriotism varies, from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy."

"The old civilisation, with all the brilliant qualities which make many moderns regret its destruction, rested on too narrow a base. The woman and the slave were left out, the woman especially by the Greeks, and the slave by the Romans."

"True contemplation considers Reality (or Being) in its manifestations as well as in its origin. If this is remembered, there need be no conflict between social morality and the inner life. Eckhart recognises that it is a harder and a nobler task to preserve detachment in a crowd than in a cell; the little daily sacrifices of family life are often a greater trial than selfimposed mortifications. "We need not destroy any little good in ourselves for the sake of a better, but we should strive to grasp every truth in its highest meaning, for no one good contradicts another." "Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him." There is much more of the same kind in Eckhart's sermons — as good and sensible doctrine as one could find anywhere."

"No word in our language — not even "Socialism"— has been employed more loosely than "Mysticism." … The history of the word begins in close connexion with the Greek mysteries. A mystic is one who has been, or is being, initiated into some esoteric knowledge of Divine things, about which he must keep his mouth shut…"

"The homosexuals are on the march in this country. Please remember, homosexuals do not reproduce! They recruit! And, many of them are after my children and your children."

"While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order."

"On Tuesday, May 14, the old fat false prophet Jerry Falwell died and entered hell. As the old preacher used to put it, he split hell wide open... Hell from beneath was moved to meet Falwell at his coming, rousing the dead, even those that used to be big-shots on Earth, now in hell, greeting him with such words as these: 'Why, hello, Reverend Fraudwell, you old money-grubbing pervert!' ... As a young preacher in Springfield, Missouri, Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist preacher who believed and preached the truth. But he saw early on that his lust for power and lucre could never be satisfied if he was faithful to the word of God. And so the old fool, like the false prophet Balaam, sold his soul for a mess of free will-ism, God loves everybody-ism, Arminianism, lies -- sold his soul for lies.""

"I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public — but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. … The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

"If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."

"The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God’s punishment if they hadn’t got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup."

"I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

"At its apex in 1979, Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour raised $37 million on 2.5 million appeals, a sum unimaginable for a gay organization. Yet throughout the 19705, the show was in and out of receivership. The pressure of mounting debt drove Falwell, whose penchant for overspending was as great as his gift for overstatement, to rely ever more heavily on solicitations stressing the alleged gay threat to American families. As Falwell's financial problems forced him to retreat from the public stage, the religious right's baton passed to the biblical reconstructionist Pat Robertson. Though he owed much to Falwell's trailblazing evangelism, Robertson, who practiced faith healing and speaking in tongues, would soon eclipse him as an entrepreneur and political preacher. Vowing not to repeat Falwell's mistakes, Robertson allowed the Christian Broadcasting Network to grow at a slow but steady rate. Until 1984, when he changed his party registration from Democratic to Republican, he largely abstained from Falwell's vituperative style of political activism."

"While the outbreak of the mysterious and deadly disease in the early 1980s spurred many religiously motivated caregivers to new heights of compassion, Falwell used it to craft new fundraising appeals. In AIDS, religious conservatives like Falwell found the punitive manifestation for homosexual behavior for which they had been searching. No longer, they reasoned, could homosexuals pretend that homosexuality was without consequences. AIDS and homosexuality would become virtually synonymous in the rhetoric of the religious right and in the nation's consciousness. Ignoring the inconvenient facts that many people with AIDS are not gay, that the vast majority of gay men would never contract HIV, and that lesbians are at extremely low risk, Falwell and his colleagues on the right played AIDS as divine retribution for sodomy. In a 1987 fund-raising letter, for instance, Falwell accused gay men of donating blood because "they know they are going to die--and they are going to take as many people with them as they can.""

"Falwell generally escaped censure for such blatant contradictions because the press was often reluctant to take him to task. When his statements and motives were called into question, he has adhered to the premise that the best defense is a good offense. Instead of answering the substance of charges, Falwell would simply suggest darkly that his critics were part of a liberal conspiracy to repress the role of Christians in government. Responding to attacks on his political views in a 1976 sermon, Falwell said, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.""

"For Falwell and the religious right, the tension between adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible and allowing the compromise inherent in mainstream politics never fully eased. In a pluralistic democracy, the voice of every participant has a priori equal standing. Yet with its insistence on the inerrancy of the Bible in public policy, the religious right raised the specter of theocracy. To deal with the competing demands--theological and political--Falwell, like Pat Robertson later in the 1980s, simply opted to adopt two contradictory positions, one intended for his core audience and one suited for public consumption, and hoped no one would notice. After backing Briggs's and Bryant's campaign to ban gays and lesbians from teaching positions in the public schools and repeatedly in sermons and fund-raising letters harping on the homosexual threat to children, Falwell told the Washington Post, "I have no objection to a homosexual teaching in the classroom as long as that homosexual is not flaunting his lifestyle or soliciting students.""

"So what’s to be done right now? The social dominators and high RWAs presently marshaling their forces for the next election in your county, state and country, are perfectly entitled to do what they’re doing. They have the right to organize, they have the right to proselytize, they have the right to select and work for candidates they like, they have the right to vote, they have the right to make sure folks who agree with them also vote. Jerry Falwell has already declared, "We absolutely are going to deliver this nation back to God in 2008!" If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can't sit these elections out and say "Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now." The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them. Research shows most people are not in this army. However Americans have, for the most part, been standing on the sidewalk quietly staring at this authoritarian parade as it marches on."

"I believe in the premillenial, pre-tribulational coming of Christ for all of his church, and to summarize that, your first poll, do you believe Jesus coming the second time will be in the future, I would vote yes with the 59 percent and with Billy Graham and most evangelicals. The second question, you asked, "Do you think he is coming in your lifetime?" I would vote neither yes nor no. I would vote I do not know, because Jesus said, "No man knows the day or the hour." So the bottom line is, I believe that we ought to be living every day as though this is the crowning day. But we should also be planning and working with the next generation in mind, because we do not know."

"Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male. This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that many theologians, Christian and non-Christian, have understood for two millennia."

"Thank God for these gay demonstrators. If I didn't have them, I'd have to invent them. They give me all the publicity I need."

"You know, you almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore. Ellen [Degeneres], and all the rest. I love them, pray for their souls, but they're immoral. And the Hollywood scene — five and eight and 10 marriages — not something to be emulated."

"Today the world has gone sex crazy. Illicit sex has become the downfall of many in the Bible. Movie stars not married to each other, having babies and making headlines all over the world as though they were doing some great thing. Big deal! Just another moral pervert. And for them to become heroes for our kids. My wife and I will be married 49 years the next anniversary."

"I have been on record all 54 years of my ministry as being opposed to dual covenant theology... I simply cannot alter my deeply held belief in the exclusivity of salvation through the Gospel of Christ for the sake of political or theological expediency. Like the Apostle Paul, I pray daily for the salvation of everyone, including the Jewish people."

"Regardless of the response from the Jewish person, we remain friends in support of the State of Israel as required by scripture."

"Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It’s an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on."

"The fact that Marc Cherry's a gay Republican means he should join the Democratic Party."

"And the fact that John Kerry would not support a federal marriage amendment [prohibiting gay marriage], it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK. We don't buy that."

"You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops and I am for the President—chase them all over the world, if it takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."