Editors From The United States

"...love is not enough... truth is also important... Good feelings cannot deliver the homosexual from the judgement of God. If he does not repent, he is doomed, but he is not alone. So are all other unrepentant sinners. God is no respecter of persons; He is also no respecter of one's sexual appetites. Hell will be partially populated by 'caring, honest, whole persons' who are proud they are gay."

"I do not look for or expect a time in history as we know it when the whole professing church will believe either in inerrancy or the major doctrines of the Christian faith. There will always be wheat and tares growing together until the angels begin their task of reaping the harvest at the end of the age. Truth shall forever be the scaffold, and wrong forever on the throne as long as time shall last. But whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, God calls His people to faithful service based on unsullied adherence to His Word with the firm conviction that not one jot or tittle shall pass away till all has been fulfilled. When Jesus Christ comes, faith shall turn into sight and what we do not know now we shall know then. And when all of the mysteries of Scripture have been unlocked, we shall see what we have always believed- that the written Word of God is free from all error, and all parts of it in some fashion or another bear witness to the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ the righteous Branch, who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords."

"I regard the subject of this book, biblical inerrancy, to be the most important theological topic of this age. A great battle rages about it among people called evangelicals. I did not start the battle and wish it were not essential to discuss it. The only way to avoid it would be to remain silent. And silence on this matter would be a grave sin. I have written this book largely for evangelical lay people in their pews who may not be aware of the central issue that faces them, their denominations, and their institutions. Because of this I have sought to write simply, avoiding technical language wherever possible. The book itself could be expanded almost indefinitely, for there is no end to the available material. The data I have used comprise only a small part of what I have personally collected for ten years."

"I do not doubt that if evangelicals in concert with each other would stand firm and tall for biblical inerrancy and the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, a new day would dawn and the blessing of God would follow. I can foresee, in that event, a new surge of spiritual power, a new advance in the task of evangelizing the world, and the establishment of churches around the world where Christ is honored, the true gospel is preached, and the kingdom of God manifested in holy power before the eyes of unconverted men. May the Lord speed that day!"

"This is a controversial book. It has to be. But I have tried to represent matters fairly and objectively. It should be understood and reacted to in the light of the facts. We are all responsible for what we say and write. I hope that I have not misquoted or misinterpreted anyone whose words appear in this book. There is a sufficient material available that makes it unnecessary to do this. In my professional life I have been involved in a number of theological controversies regarding the question of miracles. I have repeatedly stated that the supernatural is taught in Scripture. When anti-supernaturalists try to persuade me that I am mistaken I reply that I did not write the Bible. I only try to reflect what the Bible says. No one can make a case against the supernatural from the data of Scripture. The same idea is true with regard to the people I quote in this volume. Anyone who doesn't like what he says should not blame me for surfacing his opinions. I didn't say those things. The people I quote said them. And anything people, including myself, write is subject to those who read what they write."

"I have tried to tell it as it is. My responsibility ends at that point, except in those places where my own relationships give me the opportunity to carry through on my own commitment to inerrancy. Every reader of this book has a similar responsibility to do his thing in the place or places where he or she has the same opportunity."

"The very nature of inspiration renders the Bible infallible, which means that it cannot deceive us. It is inerrant in that it is not false, mistaken, or defective. Inspiration extends to all parts of the written Word of God and it includes the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit even in the selection of the words of Scripture. Moreover, the Bible was written by human and divine agencies; that is, it was the product of God and chosen men. The authors of scripture retained their own styles of writing and the Holy Spirit, operating within this human context, so superintended the writing of the Word of God that the end product was God's. Just as Jesus had a human and a divine nature, one of which was truly human and the other truly divine, so the written word of God is a product that bears the marks of what is truly human and truly divine."

"Inspiration involved infallibility from start to finish. God the Holy Spirit by nature cannot lie or be the author of untruth. If the Scripture is inspired at all it must be infallible. If any part of it is not infallible, then that part cannot be inspired. If inspiration allows for the possibility of error then inspiration ceases to be inspiration. Now no one will assert that the human authors of scripture were infallible men. But believers in infallibility do say that fallible men were kept from error by the Holy Spirit."

"Although in hundreds of cases criticisms of Scripture have been shown to be unfounded, those who refuse to believe in inerrancy never seem to be satisfied. Why is this so? Does it not constitute a frame of mind that wants to disbelieve? Does it reflect a viewpoint that says in effect, "I will not believe what the Scripture teaches about itself until every objection has been answered to my satisfaction"? Does this not tell us something about the nature of man who, though he may be regenerated, yet retains strong characteristics of the old nature so that unbelief crops up again and again? May not the real difficulty be a want of biblical faith rather than a want of evidence?"

"A journey of a thousand miles must come to an end. Even the rain water returns to the ocean from which it came. So the hour has come to draw some conclusions and let the reader make his own decision. I have presented an apologetic for biblical inerrancy. It is based on a legitimate concern. Simply stated, the concern is that evangelical Christianity is engaged in the greatest battle in its history. The central issue at stake is epistemological: it has to do with the basis of our religious knowledge. Does that knowledge come from reason, the church, or from the Bible?"

"Teens do not exist on an island. The connection between parental emotional health and the emotional health of their kids is well established. Moreover, the way parents raise their kids can, of course, directly affect emotional health."

"Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end."

"If you believe that America is and should remain a nation of laws and borders — and if you understand the logistical and physical challenges of walking 1,000 miles through Mexico — there is a relatively simple, firm way to respond to migrant caravans. To the migrants, the message is simple. The United States will secure its border and enforce its immigration laws. In accordance with those laws, it will summarily deport illegal entrants and interpret its asylum statutes in accordance with their meaning and purpose. If you do complete the journey, you will not be released into the American interior but instead held at the border. Rather than risk a fruitless journey, it is better to turn back now."

"One of the enduring mysteries of modern political discourse is the way in which smart people — who are not remotely anti-Semitic — impose curious, unworkable double standards on the nation of Israel. Let’s take, for example, the response of many on the left to the so-called Great Return March, an effort by thousands of Gazans to storm the Israeli border. After all, the international legal standards are clear. A nation has the right to protect the integrity of its border, and that right is supplemented by an inherent right of self-defense in the face of a hostile foreign power. Hamas — which rules Gaza — rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains in a state of perpetual, declared war with Israel. Any reasonable person contemplating the consequences of a border-wall breach knows that chaos and bloodshed may result."

"The counterrevolution to the American Revolution is in full force. And it can no longer be dismissed or ignored, for it is devouring our society and culture, swirling around our everyday lives, and ubiquitous in our politics, schools, media, and entertainment. Once a mostly unrelatable, fringe, and subterranean movement, it is here- it is everywhere."

"Taylor Swift, imbecile Taylor Swift just endorsed for president the most antisemitic, pro-Islamist, pro-criminal, anti-cop, anti-middle class & working people, open borders, anti-women’s sports, anti-military, inflation-causing, job-destroying, pathological liar and extremist Marxist politician ever to run for president."

"Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny. It's the only one. It's based on thousands of years of human experience. There is nothing narrow about the conservative philosophy. It's a liberating philosophy. It is a magnificent philosophy. It is a philosophy for the ages, for all times."

"Kennedy and the majority explicitly overruled Bowers and wrote that Stevens's original reasoning, in dissent, that morality alone is not a legitimate basis to support a law was right. Scalia countered, "This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, [no law against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity] can survive rational-basis review. Kennedy, traveling further and further away from his judicial responsibility to interpret the Constitution, wrote of an "emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection" to sexual decisions and reviewed how sodomy laws had been repealed in most states and even in Europe, where the European Court of Human Rights found sodomy laws invalid under the European Convention on Human Rights. Kennedy concluded with a lecture about liberty: "The petitioners are entitled to respect their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government... The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual." (Emphasis added.)"

"In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court's majority opinion in Lawrence overruled Bowers. Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority, which was long on philosophy and short on precedent. Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence is a result in search of a rationale. He began with "Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places." This statement means absolutely nothing from a constitutional perspective. Every criminal or immoral act can be justified on the grounds of exercising liberty. But Kennedy has a purpose in such an approach. By using the catchall word "liberty" rather than applying the Constitution to the issue, he seeks to expand the plain meaning of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (which prohibits states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law") to grant rights not mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution."

"In Beverley Hills only the infirm and the senile do not drive their own cars."

"It's true that the principle of subsidiarity is not a moral act, and thus is not comparable to an act like abortion. But it should never be ignored as a way of viewing the relationship between individual well-being and the various levels of institutions and governments that exert influence and authority over our thoughts and actions. If subsidiarity is forgotten, if individual liberty and responsibility are not protected, then tyranny is inevitable; and with tyranny will come heinous moral crimes as well. Subsidiarity acts as a kind of nonstop watchman of, and advocate for, human freedom. Thus, to ignore the Church's principle of subsidiarity is no moral crime per se, but it encourages habits of dependency and the avoidance of responsibility that undermine human dignity."

"We were playing bridge at Kay Graham's apartment in New York — over on the East Side. I think the other two players were my husband John Loomis and a friend of ours, John Gillespie — although the constitution of the bridge game sometimes changed. And they wanted a picture for Fortune Magazine, where I worked. And they said "Let's get one at the bridge table." So I went over and sat down and pulled my cards back — tried to look exactly like we were playing. And Warren, on the spur of the moment, leaned over to look at my cards — and I broke into laughter. It was perfect. It was a great example of his sense of humor, which is very, very extraordinary. When people say something to him, his instinctive wish is to say something funny back."

"… When Fortune published its 2013 list of the world’s 50 Most Admired Companies, five among them were 25 years old or less. Four were the usual suspects from tech land: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google. The oddball in this party of five was BlackRock (BLK), formed in 1988 by Fink and seven partners. They’d been Wall Streeters, at First Boston and Lehman. They were sell-side bond experts, but not just any sell-side experts. They were inventors and traders of the complex asset-backed instruments–like mortgage-backed securities–then newly available. Fink’s transformative idea was that the buy-side half of a trade needed help to understand these products. So his band re-created themselves as asset managers. … … BlackRock has been a supernova stock, shooting from a 1999 IPO price of $14 a share to about $320 recently. That’s 22 times the original price, and today the company has a market value of about $53 billion. Justifiably proud of this climb, Fink is fond of pointing out that it dwarfs that of the S&P 500 (up not even one time for the same period) and also wallops that of many well-known stocks, such as Berkshire Hathaway (up three times)."

"It was the year of the derivative. From last spring on, as if a blockade of ice had suddenly given way, bad news about these exotic financial innovations started to flow, and victims, corporate and public alike, began to wash ashore. In the wake of billions of dollars in losses since then, opinions about these new-age instruments have drastically hardened. “Derivatives,” observes Richard Syron, chairman of the American Stock Exchange, which trades the species called puts and calls. “That’s the 11-letter four-letter word.” The word’s elevation to pejorative status is probably justified, but not simply because wild market swings turned many derivatives players into big losers last year. What magnified those losses and sent a troubling message to regulators was disturbing instances of managerial blindness, desperate behavior, even outright fraud."

"The enlightenment tradition discovered the micro and macro dimensions more than two thousand years ago by using sophisticated contemplative practices to augment the sixth mental sense of inner vision … This realm is supernatural only in relation to a constricted definition of natural. It is mystical only when its analytic investigation is not completed. It is magic only when the technique involved is not understood."

"It was a great reluctance that I adopted my current views. I would much rather believe that’s all going to work out, that our government has the best intentions, that our society is based on a correct understanding of human nature and of history. And it was, as I say, with great reluctance that I gave up those views."

"You can’t lead bunny lives and write tiger poetry."

"It’s not just those people “out there”, in the world, who need conversion and cleansing, but also those of us who have been baptized into Christ and are members of his mystical Body. When Simon and Andrew abandoned their nets to follow Christ, they embarked on the path of conversion. But we know it was a long and often difficult path, filled with misunderstandings, failings, and, in the case of Peter, denial of the Lord. We also need constant conversion, for there is no time for anything else."

"Do we love one another enough to say that all life has value, and that dignity lies in respecting that truth until the very end? It’s suffering and heart-wrenching, but amazing things can happen in those final months and days and hours. I’ve seen it, and I’m far from alone. Don’t deprive the vulnerable of love. There should be no off-ramp, but lots of roadside assistance."

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."

"Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we've had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen. With this in our mind, what shall be said of the man who arranges famine, who forces a labor strike with its privation, its rioting, its disorder, its bayonet thrusting, and its blood-letting as an incident in his money heaping? If necessity breeds crime, what is he who creates the necessity?"

"What we’re seeing is what I call information warfare. It’s basically the kind of warfare that’s gonna dominate our society because we live in an information age, and we’re under assault from all quarters, not just the Russians. The Chinese, the Iranians, and I even put the liberal left in the kind of domestic information warfare. It’s a broad-scale assault, and the United States is ill-prepared to deal with it. We just don’t have anything that can counteract these lies and disinformation the way we did during the Cold War."

"If someone says Hugo voters are trying to pick the best stories of the year, you can find someone else who’ll say it’s just a popularity award. The enthusiast will point out growing participation has produced record–breaking numbers of Hugo voters. The cynic will dismiss that number as trivially small. But just now the only thing anyone can say about the future of the Hugos is that it’s unlikely to resemble the past; even idealists and cynics have to agree on that."

"One could rightly say that I became a Catholic by default, and that possibility is the simple gift I received from the Catholic Church. Mater ecclesia, she needed neither reasons, nor theories, nor ideas from me."

"Perhaps the secularization of our universities helps explain the tremors in public life. If one does not believe in God as Lord of history, then everything is up to us. This tempts us to fight with an almost religious desperation. Every election becomes a Final Judgment. Our preferred candidates take on religious roles as prophets and saviors. A purely secular outlook can also tempt us to give up the fight. Without confidence in God’s providential care, we can despair of ever setting things aright. So we retreat into our private concerns, neglect the common good, and just try to gain enough wealth and status to insulate ourselves from the uncertainties of life. First Things has a crucial role to play. We insist that God is Lord of history. This desacralizes politics—an urgent necessity. And it combats the hopelessness that often causes us to shrink from our civic duty, which at this particular juncture calls for the pluck to stand up to defend the sanctity of life, the dignity of marriage, the integrity of Western civilization, and the indispensable role of religion in public life."

"Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies."

"(William) Burroughs was all about the future. Was all about liberation through the dismantling of presiding orders. He was a big influence on punk culture and punk music (and me) for that reason."

"Our story is not really ours until we tell it, until it belongs to others too."

"Making a documentary is like having a dream. You can’t really anticipate what it will be. You have to constantly yield to whatever is manifested before you, to have the courage for whatever is revealed to you. Whatever truth confesses itself, even if it’s not what you anticipated. To just be a mirror. To invite in whatever arrives. To reflect it as loyally."

"Any art should be advertising for one's soul."

"Don’t hunt for what to photograph. Let images find you. You wander your desert until worthy mirage appears. Wait until that worthy shot comes. And then try to capture it."

"Photography is a hunt. But one that ends in the immortality of the prey, rather than the prey’s death."

"Patience is the only honest muse. In writing, in painting, and especially in photography."

"(Lydia) Lunch and a lot of the no wave musicians were imbued with the wisdom—and neuroses—of genuine trauma. There's the divine madness in them. When Suicide's Alan Vega sneered, you might have actually found yourself bloodied shortly thereafter. You sure as hell wouldn't reach for your iPhone to Instagram and tag his #antics. You'd feel a little intruded upon, which is precisely how all the best art should make you feel."

"Love is at essence ritual of tandem fate, of harmonized experience. It’s a holy thing, that merging of consciousness. Our minds become authored by so many of the same events, colored by so much mutual memory."

"Film photography just makes such an ally of chance, and chance is essential to any valid art, to the poetic…to life, to the spiritual."

"Love is never more than a faith, and that’s why it’s so exciting."

"There is no artistic worth in compromise, in a pair, in collaboration, in obedient unity. These are all impossible terms. Action must come from the individual. The group (even if just a population of two) is only capable of reaction."

"Much of what Negroes fight for today is not to gain new ground but to restore positions once dearly won and foully taken away."

"He had a mordant wit, always saw the humorous side to keep us all 'cracked up,' and could recite poetry by the yard. At the same time, he had an ability to put words down on paper with a speed and precision... He had a far-above-average ability to marshal his facts through well-documented research and translate his material into well-written and convincing prose."