Christians

"Africa's last remaining absolute monarch, King Mswati III of Swaziland, took power at the age of eighteen. Since then he has allowed his country to slide into extreme poverty, with 69 percent of the Swazi people living on less than $1 a day. Swaziland has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world: almost 40 percent. The nation operated without a constitution for thirty years. Mswati agreed to implement a new one in 2006; however, it bans political parties, gives Mswati the right to reject any laws passed by the legislature, and grants him immunity from all possible crimes."

"Sustaining the SDGs (sustainable development goals) will require that member states develop innovative financing strategies to ensure that implementation reaches those most left behind. At this critical juncture, including Taiwan is an essential next step if we are to successfully achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We call for Taiwan's inclusion in the United Nations system, which encompasses participation in meetings, mechanisms and activities that pertain to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Doing so would not only strengthen global cooperation and partnership, but also emphasize the principle of ensuring that "no one is left behind"."

"According to multiple sources, Crist has exploited his Christian reputation and platform to harass, manipulate and exploit young women over the last seven years. The allegations include, but are not limited to, individually sexting multiple women during the same time period, initiating sexual relationships with married women and women in committed relationships, offering show tickets in exchange for sexual favors and repeatedly calling these women late at night while drunk."

"John Crist is a man claiming to follow Jesus but living in a world of blurred lines. His intake of sexual toxicity is indicative of what is happening to millions of men in the atmosphere of our culture today. I pray he will recover."

"I feel like if there is any ribbing or maybe roasting of the church or Christian culture, I like to say it's not me pointing at you guys, it's me shining a mirror at us. I'm in the front of it, look at us. A lot of times it comes off as, if someone is making a joke about Christianity in the public forum, whether it be on social media, we are very defensive of it, because ... you're an outsider, you're against us. And I'm kind of like, 'hey, I'm with you. I grew up here, I love Jesus, I think the local church is our only hope. That being said, we do some weird stuff'."

"Over the past number of years, various women have accused me of behavior that has been hurtful to them. While I am not guilty of everything I've been accused of, I confess to being guilty of this—I have treated relationships with women far too casually, in some cases even recklessly. My behavior has been destructive and sinful. I've sinned against God, against women and the people who I love the most. I have violated my own Christian beliefs, convictions and values, and have hurt many people in the process. I am sorry for the hurt and pain I have caused these women and will continue to seek their forgiveness. I have also hurt the name of Jesus and have sought His forgiveness."

"I think Christian comedy has gotten a bad rap in the past because it's very passive, and it's not honest. It's like knock-knock jokes type humor. What we're bringing to the table is another level of honesty, and maybe transparency that I think does make some people uncomfortable."

"[but] I got an interview I got to run to"

"[Trump did a good job at the meeting] laying out a conservative agenda"

"Question: The question I have, if you’re sent to Congress, will you pursue some kind of investigation to find out whether or not this, uh, guy is really a citizen and entitled to those authorities? Meadows: Yes. If we do our job from a grassroots perspective, we won’t have to worry about it. We’ll send him back home to Kenya or wherever it is. We’ll send him back home."

"We’re gonna take back our country. 2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Obama home, to Kenya or wherever it is. We’re gonna do it."

"Anyone who consults a soothsayer on account of curiosity of the future will suffer capital punishment."

"Even a high-ranking man convicted of wizardry will face torture."

"Constantius declares a curse on those who perform the magic arts and thereby “jeopardize the lives of innocent persons.”"

"If any Jew should suppose that he should purchase the slave of another sec or people, such slave shall be immediately vindicated to the fisc. If the Jew should purchase a slave and circumcise him, he shall be penalized not only with the loss of the slave, but he shall also be visited with capital punishment."

"Pagan superstition and sacrifices are completely forbidden, in accord with the law set forth by Constantine."

"Pagan temples are to be closed; access to them is denied, and violators face capital punishment. The property of a violator will be given to the state treasury. Governors who fail to carry out this punishment will be punished."

"Those guilty of idolatry or pagan sacrifices must suffer capital punishment."

"Personally, I would forgo any other comfort to drink clean water."

"As I looked round the clearing at the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realization of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying."

"I also questioned whether it was right to try to impose on the Sudanese the conventions and values of our utterly alien civilization, and sometimes expressed these doubts in letters to my mother. I could not help feeling that other races were entitled to their own customs and moral standards, however much these might differ from ours."

"More important, something decisive in my life, he [Guy Moore] taught me to feel affection for tribesmen. Ever since then it has been people that have mattered to me, rather than places. I have never craved magnificent scenery or opportunities for sport in the way that I have longed to be with certain tribes and, above all, certain individuals among them."

"[re Danakil country] I was among a savage, good-looking people with a dangerous reputation. I was travelling with camels in hot, arid country under testing conditions where, if things went wrong, I could get no help and where men's lives depended on my judgement."

"I believe that day [Ras Tafari's victory parade, Addis Ababa, 3 Nov 1916] implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world."

"I had felt the lure of the unexplored, the compulsion to go where others had not been."

"I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills."

"The Nuristanis had retained their individuality as a race even after conversion to Islam. Now they would be visited by an ever-increasing number of expeditions seeking adventure in wild places. This would disrupt a society utterly unprepared. Each expedition by its very presence would help destroy what it had come to find."

"Looking back on my attitude to the commonly accepted pleasures of life, I can say that I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation. Existence in the desert had a simplicity that I found wholly satisfying; there, everything not a necessity was an encumbrance. It was those three months in the Sahara in 1938 that taught me to appreciate things that most Europeans are able to take for granted: clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from the rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep."

"All that is best in the Arabs came from the desert....... From the desert too has come the Arabs' pride of race, their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the reagrd they have for the dignity of others; their humour; their courage and their patience; the language that they speak, and their passionate love of poetry. But they are a race who produce their best only under conditions of extreme hardship."

"I believe that most men have an inborn desire to hunt and kill and that even today this primitive urge has only been eradicated in a small minority of the human race."

"I know that today it sounds unforgivable to have shot seventy lion in five years, but that was fifty years ago and circumstances of that time cannot be judged by those of today."

"My own tastes went, perhaps, too far to the other extreme. I loathed cars, aeroplanes, wireless and television, in fact most of our civilization's manifestations in the past fifty years, and was always happy, in Iraq or elsewhere, to share a smoke-filled hovel with a shepherd, his family and beasts. In such a household, everything was strange and different, their self-reliance put me at ease, and I was fascinated by the feeling of continuity with the past. I envied them a contentment rare in the world today and a mastery of skills, however simple, that I myself could never hope to attain."

"It is characteristic of Bedu to do things by extremes, to be either wildly generous or unbelievably mean, very patient or almost hysterically excitable, to be incredibly brave or to panic for no apparent reason. Ascetic by nature, they derive satisfaction from the bare simplicity of their lives and scorn the amenities which others would judge essential."

"These [RAF] airmen were my fellow countrymen, and I was proud to be of their race. I knew the essential decency which was the bedrock of their character, their humour, stubbornness, and self-reliance. I knew that if called upon they could adapt themselves to any kind of life, in the desert, in the jungle, in mountains or on the sea, and that in many respects no race in the world was their equal. But the things that interested them bored me. They belonged to an age of machines; they were fascinated by cars and aeroplanes, and found their relaxation in the cinema and the wireless. I knew that I stood apart from them and would never find contentment among them, whereas I could find it among the Bedu, although I should never be one of them."

"In the deserts, however arid, I have never felt homesick for green fields and woods in spring, but now that I was in England I longed with an ache that was almost physical to be back in Arabia."

"The desert Arabs had always been a people born to hardship. For them there was no ease or comfort, only the weariness of long marches and toil at well-heads. 'We are Bedu,' they boasted, and asked only the freedom that was theirs. Stoical in pain, and often very brave, they lived for the raid and the counter-raid, which were conducted according to set rules and usually with great chivalry. They took a fierce pride in danger and suffering, and never doubted their superiority over villager and townsman."

"All my life I had hated machines. I could remember how bitterly at school I had resented reading the news that someone had flown across the Atlantic or travelled through the Sahara in a car. I had realized even then that the speed and ease of mechanical transport must rob the world of all diversity."

"I have led a hard life; this was my choice. It was also an inexpensive one: this was essential. I would not have had it otherwise, nor asked for more. Looking back, I would happily live these years again, in the context of the past."

"They strolled with me through the streets hand in hand, as is usual with Arab friends, but I was lightly uncomfortable, having re-acquired my inhibitions with my trousers."

"This incident impressed upon me the Bedu’s indifference to human life. The man was sick and if God ordered it he would die. He was a stranger who came from a tribe unrelated to theirs. None of them felt an interest because he was a human being like themselves. His death would in no way affect them. Yet their code demanded that, however unwanted he might be, they should fight in his defence if he were attacked whilst with them."

"I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority."

"For untold centuries the Bedu lived in the desert; they lived there from choice.... All of them would have scorned this easier life of lesser men. Valuing freedom above all else, they took a fierce pride in the very hardship of their lives, forcing unwilling recognition of their superiority on the townsmen and villagers who feared, hated and affected to despise them. Even today there is no Arab, however sophisticated, who would not proudly proclaim Bedu lineage."

"As I listened I thought once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu. Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control. It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self-reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God."

"To me it is always the people rather than the places that matter."

"The desert Arabs had no tradition of civilisation behind them; no architectural inheritance - they lived in black tents, or in rooms devoid of furnishings in their villages and towns. They had no taste for refinements, demanded only the bare necessities of life. It was a life that produced much that was noble, little that was gracious and nothing that was artistic."

"Now that the Arabs are among the economic masters of the world I fear that many will find unendurable the boredome of their wealth."

"No wonder that in this setting [Eton], during those impressionable years, I acquired lasting respect for tradition and veneration of the past. Here, too, from masters and boys alike, I learnt responsibility, the decencies of life, and standards of civilised behaviour."

"Later he [Evelyn Waugh] asked, at second-hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I refused. Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned."

"As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile."

"…I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy."