Quotes about God
page 54

“The most surprising and original part of [ Lucien Goldmann's] work is, however, the attempt to compare—without assimilating one to another—religious faith and Marxist faith: both have in common the refusal of pure individualism (rationalist or empiricist) and the belief in trans-individual values—God for religion, the human community for socialism. In both cases the faith is based on a wager—the Pascalian wager on the existence of God and the Marxist wager on the liberation of humanity—that presupposes risk, the danger of failure and the hope of success.”

Michael Löwy (1938) French sociologist

Source: The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=gyOHaZFpvL8C&pg=PA17

Faith, Religion, Hope, Communication

“In his Gospel, St. John, through long and deep contemplation, acknowledges Jesus to be the Logos of God. In his epistles he points entirely away from himself toward Christ. Finally, in the Apocalypse, in the vision of the Lamb of God, Old and New Testaments are united, and the whole drama of salvation is summed up.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task https://books.google.it/books?id=yEjT5yVci2gC&pg=PT0, trans. John Saward, Ignatius Press, 1994. Our Task: A Report and a Plan (1984)

Christ

“Terror is trump. Methods of common brutal suppression are considered sanctified laws. "Old Fighters" are saints, and from the district leader upwards there are only Gods!”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

October 7, 1939; Vol. 1, p. 30.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

Law

“JOB. And now it’s time…
FRANNY. To curse God…
JOB. And live.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera" p. 184 (originally published in Science Fiction Age, January 1994; ellipses in the original)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Time

“Those who died in the attack were not simply humans: they were Americans; and not ordinary Americans, either, but the priests and priestesses of the supreme God of this age: the Dollar. The passengers of the domestic flights are not a valid sample of humanity either, but a wealthy, busy, environmentally damaging and world-devouring portion of mankind.”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 158

Age, World, Business

“[in a British accent] Oh, they're so royal! We're lucky to have them coming here. But the rabble undoubtedly will be violent. Scum protesters– Oh, these insane people imagining the helicopters landing and the troops– these insane schizophrenics have come to town. The rabble– I'm so glad– thank God we're elite enough to have them though. I'm so honored. [switches to Cockney accent] Get back there mate! I'll have to have you arrested and have you deported! We're protecting criminals inside, busy stealing our pension funds and overrunning the country with third world populations. Now get back, you Yankee scum! HA HA! To show you the power of the Royal Guard Brigade! And this is the scotch we've been coughing down! Look at that pumpkin-headed Yank! That's the one, Alex Jones! I want you to know, young man, we will be watching you continually while we protect the Transhumanists putting cancer viruses in our children's shots!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Alex Jones English British Accent imitates Police" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGgK9ygGluk, The Alex Jones Show, 13 May 2013. 2013

Children, People, World, Imagination

“I wept that all must die —
"Yet Love," I cried, "doth live, and conquer death —"
And Time passed by,
And breathed on Love, and killed it with his breath
Ere Death was nigh.More bitter far than all
It was to know that Love could change and die —
Hush! for the ages call
"The Love of God lives through eternity,
And conquers all!"”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"The Triumph of Time".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

Love, Death, Age, Change

“Sir king, I have been often accused of harbouring traitorous designs against you, but, as God in heaven is just and true, may this morsel of bread choke me if even in thought I have ever been false to you.”

Godwin, Earl of Wessex Anglo-Saxon nobleman; son of Wulfnoth Cild

The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (trans. Thomas Forester), Book VI
Godwin supposedly said this just before he choked to death on a piece of bread at the table of King Edward "the Confessor", but the story is very doubtful.
Misattributed

Falseness

“Hurricane [Katrina] hit the Gulf Coast and destroyed much of the Gulf Coast — that was an act of God … Now what happened to New Orleans, that was a complete failure of the federal government. Complete negligence by the feds.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

in a speech to LSU students at the Manship School of Communications' Holliday Forum on January 27, 2006.

Failure

“The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: — they acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced in His will in all things.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 435.

History

“O wise among all Angels ordinate,
God foiled of glory, god betrayed by fate,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
O Prince of Exile doomed to heinous wrong,
Who, vanquished, riseth ever stark and strong,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thou knowest all, proud king of occult things,
Familiar healer of man's sufferings,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thy love wakes thirst for Heaven in one and all:
Leper, pimp, outcast, fool and criminal,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges, Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!Ô Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!Toi qui sais tout, grand roi des choses souterraines, Guérisseur familier des angoisses humaines,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits, Enseignes par l'amour le goût du Paradis,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! "Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Litanies_de_Satan Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Love, Fate, Fools, Angels

“That God is quoted verbatim, that God is said to be speaking (when, in fact, he is being spoken for) points to either the remarkable arrogance of the biblical contributors or their unshakeable conviction that their access to the deity was total.
The fateful, and perhaps even unwitting, manipulation performed by the Hebrew Bible is to have convinced its readers that what stands in front of them is not a hodgepodge of texts worked over by countless men position across time and motivated by mundane political and theological interests. Instead, it presents itself as a self-evident treasury of the actual words, though, actions, political opinions, and future aspirations of Yahweh. From early on, apparently, interpreters wholly swallowed this argument.”

Jacques Berlinerblau (1966) Associate Professor, Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service,…

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 65

Men, Fate, Quotes, Motivation

“I think the verdict that has been given against me is a proof that I am more than ordinary myself, but that the circumstances and the help that is given is more than ordinary, are more than ordinary, and although I consider myself only as others, yet by the will of God, by his Providence, by the circumstances which have surrounded me for fifteen years, I think that I have been called to do something which at least in the North-West nobody has done yet, and in some way I think that to a certain number of people the verdict against me to day is a proof that maybe I am a prophet, maybe Riel is a prophet. He suffers for it.”

Louis Riel (1844–1885) Canadian politician

Address on sentencing (1885)

People, Way, Thinking, Suffering

“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.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 58

Love, Wisdom, Christ

“The people will come to their own at last,—
God is not mocked forever.”

John Hay (1838–1905) American statesman, diplomat, author and journalist

"The Sphynx of the Tuileries", Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces (1873).

People

“Jehovah is the Lord of the universe, and no responsible creature can feel itself in its right place except in cheerful loyalty to its Creator. And Jehovah is the Joy of the universe, and no intelligent being but must feel a great void in its affections, till once it love the Lord its God with all its strength and mind.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 610.

Love, Feeling, Intelligence, Universe

“First of all, Scripture draws our attention to this, that if we want ease and tranquility in our lives, we should resign ourselves and all that we have to the will of God, and at the same time we should surrender our affections to him as our Conqueror and Overlord.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 40.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

Time, Drawing

“The universe is God’s son.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“God’s Son,” p. 105
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Is It Possible to Write a Poem”

Universe

“The Church offers comradeship with Jesus in all the affairs of life. It gives men a clearer understanding of the mind of Christ. It is through Christ that they come to know God. The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) American pastor

Statement co-authored with Joseph Fort Newton and Charles E. Jefferson, edited by Charles Steltzle, as quoted in The American Scrap Book (1928), p. 15; also in Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches (1930), p. 85

Life, Men, Friendship, Understanding

“The more they persecute me, the more the favour of God upon my life. The more they persecute me, the more God will increase my blessing.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On the blessings in persecution - "Persecution Has Increased My Blessings – TB Joshua https://www.thenigerianvoice.com/news/1132/persecution-has-increased-my-blessings-tb-joshua.html Modern Ghana (September 17 2009)

Life

“TUURI: Let not evermore, / let the gods celebrate / with mortal people! / The gods have long festivals, / man's life is fleeting, / swift as a wheel's turn …”

Eino Leino (1878–1926) Finnish poet and journalist

Life, People

“A civil sword (as woeful experience in all ages has proved) is so far from bringing or helping forward an opposite in religion to repentance that magistrates sin grievously against the work of God and blood of souls by such proceedings… Religion cannot be true which needs such instruments of violence to uphold it so.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644)

Age, Religion, Soul, Help

“It's not a comfortable thing, to be chosen so. I tried to avoid it for a long time, but God finds ways of dealing with draft dodgers.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Way, Time

“Christ's miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body — and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands — that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 65.

Life, Death, Sense, Christ

“Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.”

William Bradford (1590–1657) English Separatist leader in Leiden, Holland and in Plymouth Colony (1590-1657)

Ch. 1.

“These savages and their false gods! I grow weary of them. Yet they are necessary; the priests and the gods of slaves always fight on the side of the Masters. It is a rule of nature.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Sixth Column

Source: Sixth Column (1949; originally serialized in 1941), Chapter 5 (p. 62)

Nature, Fight, Falseness

“The sky drips its spectral
And Gods, like men, to soot revert.
Gone is the mild, the serene air.
The golden years are come too late.
Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,
But what blind motion, what dim last
Regret of men who slew their past
Raised up this bribe against their fate.”

Donald Davidson (1893–1968) American poet, essayist, critic and author

On a Replica of the Parthenon

Wisdom, Men, Fate

“He takes coke and has slept with a prostitute - but he's a TV presenter for God's sake!”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

On the sacking of Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You. Quoted in The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/stephen-fry-a-restless-soul-546925.html 2000s

“Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 51
1910s

“"I'm a Soldier, not a bloody clerk! I fetch bloody forage, count bloody shovels, and take punishment drills. It's yes, sir, no, sir, can I dig your latrine, sir, and it's not bloody soldiering!" "It is bloody soldiering! What the hell else do you think soldiering is? Do you think you can win a war without forage? Or without shovels? Or, God help us, without latrines? That is soldiering! Just because you've been allowed to swan about like a bloody pirate for years doesn't mean you shouldn't take your turn at real work."”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and Major Michael Hogan, p. 114
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Company (1982)

War, Hell, Thinking, Help

“God is everywhere present by His power. He rolls the orbs of heaven with His hand; He fixes the earth with His foot; He guides all creatures with His eye, and refreshes them with His influence; He makes the powers of hell to shake with His terrors, and binds the devils with His word.”

Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) English clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 274.

Hell

“My visions were miracles that saved the country. My reign has saved the country and it’s saved it because God was besides me. I mean, it’s not fair for me to take all the credit for myself for the great things that I’ve done for Iran. Mind you, I could. But I don’t want to, because I know that there was someone else behind me. It was God.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Oriana Fallaci (December 30, 1973), The Mystically Divine Shah of Iran (interview), Chicago Tribune
Interviews

Country

“Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 123

Age

“…I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/22/palin-god-will-do-the-right-thing-on-election-day/?
2014

“Men like these—men by the millions—have deepened and defined our very understanding of what is true and just in the wide world from which they came. We know—as our forefathers knew—the firm ground on which our beliefs must stand. Freedom is rooted in the certainty that the brotherhood of all men springs from the Fatherhood of God. And thus, even as each man is his brother’s keeper, no man is another’s master.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)

Men, World, Spring, Understanding

“This fight is not going to be over in 10 minutes or 10 weeks; there’s no quick solution. If you think it’s taking too long, remember, God is with you.”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 43

Thinking, Fight

“Before it can be said, then, that human freedom and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme Reason are really reconciled, we must have found some way of harmonising the eternity of the human spirit with the creative and regenerative offices of God. The sense of their antagonism is nothing new. Confronted with the race-wide fact of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any but a temporal being; quite as the common-sense of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limitations of the sensory life, proclaims the mere finitude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because the price of their being real is the attributing to man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite! merely finite!" is the steadfast cry of the old theology and of the plodding common realist alike; and, sad to say, of most of historic philosophy too. And the old theology, with more penetrating consistency than the realistic ordinary man or the ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindication of the Divine Sovereignty from all human encroachment by denying the freedom of man altogether.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.330-1

Life, Sadness, Dreams, Way

“God never had a church but there, men say,
The Devil a chapel hath raised by some wyles.
I doubted of this saw, till on a day
I westward spied great Edinburgh’s Saint Gyles.”

William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) British writer

Posthumous Poems, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Section 4, Member 1, Subsection 1 .

Men

“When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Men, Truth, Youth, Soul

“I think that Man in creating God somewhat overestimated his abilities.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

aphorism used in mRIF http://monochrom.at/mrif

Thinking, Funny, For Men

“I’m not blaming religion for all or even most human barbarism. Of course faith in God generates compassion and altruism as well. Religious belief probably motivated some rescue workers who tried so heroically to save people from the wreckage. Religious belief offers solace and strength to people in the awful aftermath of the attack. But while they gather together to pray and seek comfort, protection, or approval from God, so do the terrorists. Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack, we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.”

Wendy Kaminer (1949) American lawyer

"Our Very Own Taliban" (17 September 2001)

People, Faith, Religion, Motivation

“The central problem of the Greek tragedies is why we suffer so at the hands of God. The movement that evoked Greek tragedy in the fifth century B. C. was spread over the East Mediterranean evoking a parallel response in Israel. …And as in Greek tragedy, Job deals with the problem of why man suffers so at the had of God.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

Problem, Suffering

“Yes, he's a prick, but he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit!”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

About Ty Cobb, a notoriously vicious player. Quoted in The Sporting News (12 July 1950); as actually published in The Sporting News, "prick" was replaced by "[censored]" — elsewhere, including Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America's National Pastime (1994) the quote has appeared as "Ty Cobb is a prick." or sometimes "Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit."

“If God wanted us to believe in him, he'd exist.”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

"10 Funniest Londoners" http://www.timeout.com/london/comedy/features/2/2.html, TimeOut, 23rd June, 2005.

“Thanks be to God, that he gave me Stubborness, when I know I am right.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to Edmund Jenings, 27 September 1782 http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-13-02-0217, also quoted in John Adams (2008) by David McCullough, p. 272 1780s

“We are committed, in front of God, to the Egyptian and Arab people that we will protect Egypt, the Egyptians and their free will.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

-El-Sisi http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/10/07/egyptian-people-will-never-forget-who-stood-with-them-or-against-them-al-sisi/ 2013

People

“High up where the poor sat, the people quaked with fear:
they saw the soul stretched on the ground, a votive beast
beaten by the conflicting powers of light and dark,
and their minds shook, nor knew now what great god to choose,
for comfort's road dropped to the right, the rough ascent
rose to the left, and both roads seemed to lead to God,
while at the crossroads stood the human heart, and swayed.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Book VI, line 242
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

People, Fear, Soul, Light

“God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings — not dummies! Be personal — be prejudiced — be catty — be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Dr Reilly
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

Way, Soul, Personality

“I believe that I have cosmic religious feelings. I never could grasp how one could satisfy these feelings by praying to limited objects. The tree outside is life, a statue is dead. The whole of nature is life, and life, as I observe it, rejects a God resembling man. I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don't speculate on what will happen to me. I live here now, and my responsibility is in this world now.... I deal with natural laws. This is my work here on earth.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 64

Life, World, Law, Feeling

“If Christian mysticism and its goal, ecstasy, is the contact of man with God through a leap from human nature to divine nature, national mysticism is nothing other than the contact of man and crowds with the soul of their race through the leap which these forces make from the world of personal and material interests into the outer world of race. Not through the mind, since this anyone can do, but by living with their soul.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

World, Soul, Nature, Personality

“He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.”

Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895) British hymn-writer and poet

Hymn: All things bright and beautiful http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm

“The most acceptable prayer is the one offered with the utmost spirituality and radiance; its prolongation hath not been and is not beloved by God. The more detached and the purer the prayer, the more acceptable is it in the presence of God.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

VII, 19
The Persian Bayán

“When human beings banish God from the world, they make Gods of themselves.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Other Quotes

World

“The homosexuals say they are for God. Now, who are we going to believe, God or the pervert?”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Audio lectures, Homosexuality (n. d.)

“But while Ricardo, the economist, walked like a god (although he was a modest and retiring person), Malthus was relegated to a lower status.”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter IV, Parson Malthus and David Ricardo, p. 77

Personality

“Besides, large-scale general plans : 1) they will seek to break the bonds between earth and heaven, doing their best to spread, on a large scale, atheistic and materialistic theories, degrading the Romanian people, or even just its leaders, to a people separated from God and its dead, they will kill them, not with the spear, but by cutting the roots of their spiritual life; 2) they will then break the links of the race with the soil, material spring of its wealth, attacking nationalism and any idea of Fatherland and homeland; determined to succeed, they will seek to seize the press; 4) they will use any pretext, since in the Romanian people there are dissensions, misunderstandings, and quarrels, to divide them into as many antagonistic parties as possible; 5) they will seek to monopolise more and more the means of existence of Romanians; 6) they will systematically drive them to dissoluteness, annihilating family and moral force without forgetting to degrade and daze them through alcoholic drinks and other poisons. And, in truth, anyone who would want to kill and conquer a race could do it by adopting this system.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

Life, People, Alcohol, Truth

“God bless the King! (I mean our faith's defender!)
God bless! (No harm in blessing) the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King,
God bless us all! That's quite another thing!”

John Byrom (1692–1763) Poet, inventor of a shorthand system

Verse "Intended to allay the Violence of Party-Spirit"
Miscellaneous Poems (1773)

Faith

“Thought of tomorrow is the cause of much worry and anxiety. Commentary:—The thought of tomorrow such as "Where shall I go? What shall I eat?" etc., brings about planning. This planning and such thoughts rob a man of his peace of mind and make him restless and uneasy. The best thing to do is to depend fully upon God and to avoid planning, i. e., not to live either in the things of the past or of the future and to be indifferent to the things of the present. Contentment alone can give a man peace of mind and happiness.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

No. 165, p. 147
Revelation (1951)

Happiness, Peace, Past, Future

“Our earnest prayer is that God will graciously vouchsafe prosperity, happiness, and peace to all our neighbors, and like blessings to all the peoples and powers of earth.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901).
1900s

Happiness, People, Peace

“When we believe that to any degree, when you have any element of that influence upon you, your whole perspective of both your child and yourself is going to be different. And this is why our parents, the parents of our generation were more mature, very often and capable of receiving responsibilities at an earlier age, because they were not as extensively influenced by evolutionary psychology. And this is why children who are now growing up in a christian school environment, come to maturity more readily than some of us did. An evolutionary psychology does leave you a warped view on man. An evolutionary psychology looks backward to primitive man and his primitive past… Biblical psychology looks to a mature creation, Adam, and to a God given declared purpose ahead for mankind.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

Children, Age, School, Parent

“Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Speech to voters of South Salford (1906), quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), p. 204
Response to his Tory opponent's slogan, "Don't vote for a Frenchman and a Catholic". On polling day, 13 January 1906, Belloc, standing as a Liberal, overturned a Conservative majority to win by 852 votes, winning again four years later, though by an even slimmer margin.

Religion

“My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Farewell, p. 453
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

Truth

“Why does God want us to let go of our dreams? Because anything you are unwilling to let go of is an idol, and you are in sin.”

Phil Vischer (1966) American puppeter

Source: Me, Myself, & Bob (2006), p. 236

Dreams

“When you read God’s Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking - this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness. Not a single one of those to whom the cause of Christianity in the higher sense has been entrusted forgot to urge this again and again as most crucial, as unconditionally the condition if you are to come to see yourself in the mirror.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 36-37
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

Sense, Reading

“Christians in this country should start taking another fresher look at their doctrinal content in trying to assume they know the mandate of God.”

Esala Tuibua

Comments on the government's proposed Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, 2 August 2005

Country

“[Chantal to Fiodor:] "It seems to me that evil is much less complicated than you would like to believe. Here or anywhere else there is only one sin."
"What sin?"
"To tempt God," she said. "And what's the use? I think you are really very stupid. God looks where He pleases. If He has not yet looked at you, what is the use of tempting Him?"”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: La joie (Joy) 1929, p.27

Stupidity, Thinking, Evil

“The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions. … Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race. … Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire. Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference and to build up their own culture, free from governmental interference. These rights are inherent in the Constitution of the United States and in the American system of government, both state and national, to promote and protect this right.”

James Eastland (1904–1986) American politician

1950s

Men, Children, Truth, School

“The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

Fellow Teachers (1973)

War, Truth, Education, Game

“God hath in truth testified in His Book and so also have testified the company of His angels, His Messengers and those endued with divine knowledge, that thou hast believed in God and in His signs and that everyone is guided aright by virtue of thy guidance. This is indeed a boundless grace which God, the Ever-Living, the Self-Subsisting, hath graciously conferred upon thee aforetime and will confer hereafter. And since thou didst believe in God before the creation, He hath in truth, at His own behest, raised thee up in every Revelation. There is no God but Him, the Sovereign Protector, the All-Glorious.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Tablet to the First Letter of the Living

Truth, Books, Angels, Knowledge

“Duty is ours; consequences are God's.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Though this was a favorite motto of Jackson, and reported as among his last words, it did not originate with him, and was used by others at least as early as in a speech by abolitionist John Jay (8 October 1856)
Misattributed

“Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Old Home Town (1935), Ch. 1.

Knowledge, Universe, Clothes

“Rossini was gentle with her. "In one way or another, we all have to cope with the essential solitude of being human, whether we're celibate or married."
"If you're a good person, doesn't God fill your loneliness?"
"He fills it, I think, with a divine discontent."”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Cardinal Luca Rossini and his daughter Luisa Ortega in Ch. 7
Eminence (1998)

Way, Thinking, Solitude, Personality

“Kernik had stumbled on an immutable truth, a truth older than the world. Priests claimed the gods made men, but this was not so. Men made the gods. Firstly, by forming them in clay, by chipping them from stone. Secondly, and more importantly, by believing in them, believing in them utterly.”

Tanith Lee book Volkhavaar

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 6 (p. 52)

Men, Truth, World

“The aim of such a religion is not merely to "glorify God"; rather, it is to glorify all souls, as all in the image of God; to glorify them by fulfilling for every one of them its vocation to repeat in a new way the life of universal love that is the life of God, and thus to attain, through the universal greatening, such a real glorification of God as other forms of religion seek after in vain.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.255

Love, Life, Religion, Way

“Hermes:
Much must he toil who serves the Immortal Gods.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875)

“God is only a great imaginative experience.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, pt. 4, ed. by E. McDonald, (1936)

Imagination

“Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. … This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

'Essays in Science (1934) p. 11. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions On Scientific Truth (1954) p. 261, Crown Publishers, Inc. New York, New York, USA, 1954, ISBN 0679601058.
1940s

World, Feeling, Intelligence

“Be strong, believe in freedom and in God, love yourself, understand your sexuality, have a sense of humor, masturbate, don't judge people by their religion, color or sexual habits, love life and your family.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

From The Great Rock 'N' Roll Quote Book http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/madonna_2.htm.

Love, Life, People, Family

“I do admit to mocking atheists, because mockery is a legitimate form of debate according to my rule Book. God Himself mocks evil men who refuse His moral government”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

see Proverbs 1:26-27
[Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution, 2009-09-22, WorldNetDaily, Los Angeles, 9781935071235, 2009931567, 90, http://books.google.com/books?id=1wqMdLiV970C&pg=PA90]
edit of statement in * Cruelty and hatred
Atheist Central
2009-04-27
http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2009/04/cruelty-and-hatred.html
2011-10-21

Men, Books, Evil

“If you have money in the stock market, if you have… may I just recommend you have some cash handy, that you have your food and everything else ready. I hope to God that none of this stuff happens, but you have people who are anarchist revolutionaries who are intent on collapsing the system, they are trying to break the system.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2011

Money, People, Food, Hope

“Do you know what good art is? It is saying "ta" to God.”

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) English painter

As quoted in Times Thievish Progress (1970) by John Rothenstein; "ta" is a British form of "thank you."

Art

“Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, “Stop!”? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, “No, Hoyt,” in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.
Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns – oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right – Now! She must say “No, Hoyt” and talk to him like a dog[…]”

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) American author and journalist

Source: I am Charlotte Simmons (2004), p. 368-9, winner of the 12th annual The Literary Review Bad Sex Award

Dogs, Way

“What preoccupies most scientists now is not how much they know compared to 50 years ago, though that is enormous as a difference, but how little they know compared to what they're finding out […] For a few milliseconds really of cosmic time our species has lived on one very very small rock, in a very small solar system that's a part of a fantastically unimportant suburb, in one of an uncountable number of galaxies […] Every single second since the big bang a star the size of our sun has blown up, gone to nothing […] And indeed physicists now exist who can tell you the date on which our sun will follow suit […] We know when it's [the world] coming to an end and we know how it will be, but we know something even more extraordinary which is the rate of expansion of this explosion we're looming through is actually speeding up. Our universe is flying apart further and faster than we thought it was […] Everyone who studies it professionally finds it impossible to reconcile this extraordinarily destructive, chaotic, self-destructive process, to find in it the finger of god, to find in that the idea of a design. And it's not just because we know so little about it, it's because what we know about it that's essential doesn't seem as if it's the intended result brought about by a divine-benign creator who loves every single one of us living as we do on this tiny rock in this negligible suburb of the cosmos.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski, 18/11/2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctuloBOYolE&t=11m29s 2010s, 2010

Love, World, Star, Idea

“The Christianity of the first centuries recognized as productions of good art, only legends, lives of saints, sermons, prayers, and hymn-singing evoking love of Christ, emotion at his life, desire to follow his example, renunciation of worldly life, humility, and the love of others; all productions transmitting feelings of personal enjoyment they considered to be bad, and therefore rejected … This was so among the Christians of the first centuries who accepted Christ teachings, if not quite in its true form, at least not yet in the perverted, paganized form in which it was accepted subsequently.
But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale conversion of whole nations by order of the authorities, as in the days of Constantine, Charlemagne and Vladimir, there appeared another, a Church Christianity, which was nearer to paganism than to Christ's teaching. And this Church Christianity … did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity — the direct relationship of each individual to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all people, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence — but, on the contrary, having founded a heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, but not only of these divinities themselves but of their images, it made blind faith in its ordinances an essential point of its teachings.
However foreign this teaching may have been to true Christianity, however degraded, not only in comparison with true Christianity, but even with the life-conception of the Romans such as Julian and others, it was for all that, to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher doctrine than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good and bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a religion to them, and on the basis of that religion the art of the time was assessed. And art transmitting pious adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints, and the angels, a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear of torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the grave, was considered good; all art opposed to this was considered bad.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Love, Life, People, Fear

“It is an irony to see in some Muslim societies someone who curses God, in his daily slang when angry, go out and protest against the Danish cartoons about the Prophet.”

Yasser Harrak Canadian liberal writer, columnist and human rights activist

Yasser Harrak. 2010. "Origins of Insluting Islam in the Sunna and in Muslim societies". Annabaa Information Network. Accessed January 20, 2010. http://annabaa.org/nbanews/2010/05/243.htm

“I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Life, Death, Hate

“All the people who are hating me right now and are here waiting to see me die, when you wake up in the morning you aren't going to feel any different. You are going to hate me as much tomorrow as you do tonight.
Reach out to God and he will hear you. Let him touch your hearts. Don't hate all your lives.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

Final statement before his execution (5 February 1999), quoted in "Man Who Killed 3 as Teen Is Among Pair Executed" in Los Angeles Times (5 February 1999) http://articles.latimes.com/1999/feb/05/news/mn-5135.

Hate, People, Feeling, Waiting

“I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to have been a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world. The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature? Either way, my writing, the only thing I have ever succeeded in doing, is invalidated.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)

World, Way, Literature, Problem

“"Among the types of human activity which have always played a role in history, the soldier is least subject to ressentiment. Nietzsche is right in pointing out that the priest is most exposed to this danger, though the conclusions about religious morality which he draws from this insight are inadmissible. It is true that the very requirements of his profession, quite apart from his individual or national temperament, expose the priest more than any other human type to the creeping poison of ressentiment. In principle he is not supported by secular power; indeed he affirms the fundamental weakness of such power. Yet, as the representative of a concrete institution, he is to be sharply distinguished from the homo religiosus—he is placed in the middle of party struggle. More than any other man, he is condemned to control his emotions (revenge, wrath, hatred) at least outwardly, for he must always represent the image and principle of “peacefulness.” The typical “priestly policy” of gaining victories through suffering rather than combat, or through the counterforces which the sight of the priest's suffering produces in men who believe that he unites them with God, is inspired by ressentiment. There is no trace of ressentiment in genuine martyrdom; only the false martyrdom of priestly policy is guided by it. This danger is completely avoided only when priest and homo religiosus coincide."”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Men, Peace, History, Support

“Peace is the gift of God who through the death and resurrection of Christ, reconciled humans with himself and with one another. However, peace is also a human achievement since it is to be ushered in through the practice of love and justice.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2007) World Peace: An Impossible Dream? , Mumbai: St Pauls
On Peace

Love, Death, Peace, Justice

“As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.”

Lorenzo Snow (1814–1901) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Nature of God (see also: God in Mormonism)
http://lds.org/ensign/1982/02/i-have-a-question/i-have-a-question?lang=eng
Is President Lorenzo Snow’s oft-repeated statement—“As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be”—accepted as official doctrine by the Church?
I Have a Question
Lund, Gerald N.
February
1982
Ensign

“God isn't dead — he's just missing in action.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

Source: The Broadside Tapes 1 (made in the 1960s; published c. 1980), Liner notes

Dead

“Since God has been carrying on His dispensation through the Christian church, He and we are responsible to convey this message to the Christians first. Until our mission with the Christian church is over, we must quote the Bible and use it to explain the Divine Principle. After we receive the inheritance of the Christian church, we will be free to teach without the Bible. Now, however, our primary mission is to witness to the Christian church. When they recognize and accept our movement, the world restoration will be very easy. So go to the Christians. In reality, Christians are quicker to understand the Principle than non-Christians. Sometimes non-Christians may accept it quickly, but it is hard to put the roots into deep soil. They accept for a few days, then run away.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Master Speaks (1967) Part 7: Bible Interpretation http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Books/sm-mast/MSTRSP-7.htm, (transcriptions of Q&A sessions in March-April 1965)

World, Quotes, Understanding, Reality

“To be in politics is to be misjudged. But the moment I flourish the axe, murder the hog, look at the brains of the hog sloshing around in the bucket, I anoint my face with the blood, the offal, and I give out a mighty cry to the Gods upon Olympus.”

Steve Hilton (1969) British political consultant

Said after Hilton threatens to 'murder the hog', as quoted in "Hilton threatens to 'murder the hog'" http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,,1962285,00.html, The Guardian, October 22, 2011

Cry