“The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.”
— Marya Mannes (1904-1990), author-journalist
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.”
— President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in a letter to J. Norville, 1805
“Somebody, somewhere, love me.”
— Repeated phrase in the diaries of atheist Madeline Murray O’Hare (1919-1995?)
“Well of course I believe in [the Virgin Birth]; it’s so absolutely beautiful, it has to be true whether it happened or not.”
— Unnamed 18-year-old Christian student
“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”
— George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish minister and writer
“A big issue in every gay man’s background is father bonding and I was always drawn to a father figure.”
— Mike Ensley (2005), former homosexual
*75% of college freshman are “searching for meaning and purpose in life.”
— UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, 2005
“If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.”
— Vince Lombardi (1913-1970), 5-time NFL champion coach including Super Bowls I & II
*“It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.”
— President George Washington, Aug. 10, 1798
*“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
— Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician and philosopher
*“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
— W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993), American statistician, college professor and mathematical physicist
“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”
— Harold Wilson (1916-1995), British Prime Minister
*“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
— Bob Dylan, rock icon
“Those under twenty-five are now the fastest-growing group filing for bankruptcy.”
— Alissa Quart (2004)
“Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”
— Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
*“If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.”
— G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), British writer and Christian thinker
*“In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor, Renovation of the Heart, p. 52
“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”
— Maggie Kuhn (1905-1995), Gray Panthers founder
“Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.”
— Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973), American fighter pilot
“Any fool can criticize, and most of them do.”
— C. Garbett, Catholic Archbishop
“I frankly think the soul or personage comes in when the fetus is accepted by the mother.”
— James McMahon, abortionist
“Tolerance sounds like a virtue, and at times it may be. [But should] a parent be tolerant of behavior that is harming a child? Or the police be tolerant of criminals who prey upon others? Should doctors be tolerant of disease, or public schoolteachers tolerant of any answer on an exam, no matter how wrong?”
— Dave Hunt (2005), Christian discernment writer
“To allow lust (or strong desires) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God’s.”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor, Renovation of the Heart, p. 210
“Worse than being blind, is to have no vision.”
— Helen Keller (1880-1968), blind and deaf educator
“I believe that George Washington knew the City of Man cannot survive without the City of God; that the Visible City will perish without the Invisible City.”
— President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
“If we fail to reproduce ourselves, and pass the torch of life into the hands of the next generation, Christianity would be over in just one generation. Yet, because of the POWER of multiplication, we are also just one generation away from worldwide fulfillment of the Great Commission-the choice is ours.”
— Neil Cole, church planter
“Feelings…give us a sense of being alive. Without feelings we have no interest in things, no inclination to action…. That is why so many people become dependent upon ‘substances’ and activities that give them feeling, even if the dependence badly harms them and those near them. Such a condition is also the frequent background to suicide. Harmful feeling…will eventually be taken by a human being as better than no feeling at all.”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor, Renovation of the Heart, p. 121
“Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”
— President George Washington (1732-1799)
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
— Erika Harold, Miss America (2003)
“Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”
— Vincent Damon Furnier, aka Alice Cooper, rock musician
“Only God truly forgives, man sometimes forgives, nature never forgives.”
— Jerome Lejeune (1925-1994), French pediatrician and geneticist
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
— Bumper sticker
“I was a very idealistic, very romantic kid in a very typically Midwestern Methodist repressed home. There was no show of affection of any kind, and I escaped to dreams and fantasies produced, by and large, by the music and the movies of the ’30s.”
— Hugh Hefner, Playboy pornographer
“There is nothing outside the text.”
— Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), French deconstructionist philosopher
“In cases where the person commits an extremely grave concern, he or she shall be given the death penalty.”
— Article 47, North Korean Criminal Code (1987)
*“Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”
— George Washington Carver (1864-1943), American botanist and educator
“Clinical depression is an extreme form of a ‘bad mood.’”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor, Renovation of the Heart, pp. 127-128.
*“The barber on the street in ancient Constantinople had a sharper understanding of the deity of Christ than does the average evangelical today.”
— Christianity Today, “Who and Where are the Evangelicals?” December 21, 1979
*“Of all the arts, the most important is the cinema.”
— Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Communist dictator and Soviet Union founder
“Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor, Renovation of the Heart, p. 160
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
— Plato (427-347 BC), Greek philosopher
“The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.“
— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American philosopher, naturalist, transcendentalist and pacifist
“Follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
— Antony Flew, British philosophy professor and skeptic who renounced his life’s work in atheism and accepted theism at age 81.
“The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
— C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), British writer and Christian thinker
“Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”
— President George Washington (1732-1799)
“After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.”
— Yo-Yo Ma, World renowned cellist (Sun-Sentinel, 11/8/05, A-4)
“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
— Frank Herbert (1920-1986), sci-fi writer
“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.”
— Margaret Young (1892-1969), singer
“He that believes dares trust God for the morrow, and is not more solicitous [anxious] for the next year than he is for that which is past.”
— Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667 ), British clergyman, quoted in Gold Cord by Amy Carmichael
“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.”
— Edith Wharton (1862-1937), writer
*“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
— Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), short story writer
“Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.”
— Tom Robbins, actor, director, producer, screenwriter
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, that is the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead (1901-1978), anthropologist
*“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
— Omar M. Ahmad, Board Chair, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
*“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”
— Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher
“There is no security on this Earth; there is only opportunity.”
— Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), American general in WW 2
“American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.”
— Os Guinness, philosopher/writer
“Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”
— Lord Acton (1834-1902), British scholar and historian
“So, if someone asks my advice, it is always the same: Trust Jesus Christ. I wouldn’t trust the Buddha for a bushel of oranges. Often when people talk about the Buddha they don’t realize that from a Buddhist point of view, the best thing that could happen to you would be for you to stop existing. The best thing. That’s not much of a gospel.
“I always say, if you’ve got someone who honestly is better than Jesus, trust them. And if you don’t, trust him. By all means, don’t trust yourself, because you’re the one who’s got the problem.”
— Dr. Dallas Willard, professor of philosophy, USC
“Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”
— Alice Paul (1885-1977), drafter of original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923
“I don’t know much any more what right and wrong even is. The demons have taken over.”
— Convicted sex offender and murderer Joseph Edward Duncan III (2005)
*“Every human being is wired for God.”
— Harvey Benson, Harvard professor
“Look for the coming man.”
— Adolf Hitler (1889-945) to his secretary Traudl Junge (1920-2002) shortly before the dictator’s suicide.
“Excitement and reward exist only outside your comfort zone. You’ll experience neither of them until you make yourself do something you really don’t want to do. So what is it that scares the hell out of you?”
— Roy H. Williams, “The Wizard,” advertising guru
“He whom you would change you must first love.”
— Martin Luther King (1929-1968), civil rights leader and minister
*[About Christopher Columbus:] “When he started out he didn’t know where he was going, when he got there he didn’t know where he was, and when he got back he didn’t know where he had been.”
— Anonymous
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
— Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945 (1892-1984), German pastor
*“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German physicist
“Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.”
— Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, to Edward Nawotka in an interview.
*“Storytellers will be the most valued workers in the 21st Century.”
— The editors of The Futurist magazine, Nov/Dec, 1996
“I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience…”
— Al Gore, former US Vice-President, admitting to overstating the global warming threat in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, May 9, 2006
“Not much happens without a dream. And for something great to happen, there must be a great dream. Behind every great achievement is a dreamer of great dreams.”
— Robert K. Greenleaf (1900-1990), former president of AT&T in Servant Leadership
“I think we were all building a house on false foundations.”
— Sam Cagnina in the documentary Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family about a 3-some “family” with Steven Margolin and Samantha Singh (BreakPoint radio broadcast, June 15, 2006).
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
— Will Rogers (1879-1935), American humorist, actor, entertainer
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”
— Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), British writer
“Music is worship: whether it’s worship of women or their designer, the world or its destroyer…the smoke goes upwards…to God or something you replace God with…usually yourself.”
— Bono, singer/musician and U2 frontman
“Jesus Christ is too important to be left to the theologians.”
— Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006), European Lutheran scholar and historian
“Christ is more of an artist than the artists; He works in the living spirit and the living flesh; He makes men instead of statues.”
— Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch artist/painter
“If you believe in God, you go to Heaven when you die. If you don’t, you go to North Korea.”
— Pastor Lee, a former prisoner of North Korea
“The hardest thing about being a communist is trying to predict the past.”
— Milovan Djilas (1911-1995), Yugoslav communist author-politician
“Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time…. It’s just harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter.”
— Ann Coulter, legal correspondent in Godless, page 195
“The American culture has passed the demand for privacy now. I think it’s the demand for something else. I call it the demand for anonymity. People actually want to be able to do things in public that nobody remembers?to be able to do things on the streets and in the bright lights and remain anonymous.”
— John Ashcraft, former US Attorney General (HUMAN EVENTS, Vol. 62, No. 36, 10/23/06, p. 16)
“We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves…. We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere – except where we actually are physically.”
— Linda Stone, technologist (to columnist Thomas Friedman, Sun-Sentinel, 11/2/06, P13)
“Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the donut, but the pessimist sees the hole.”
— McLandburgh Wilson, American writer (b. 1915)
“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is disappearing.”
— R. D. Laing (1927-1989), Scottish psychiatrist
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead (1901-1978), American anthropologist and professor
“The most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important thing . . . is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities.”
— Peter Drucker, managerial trainer in The Daily Drucker; 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done (Peter Drucker and Joseph A Maciariello; New York: Harper, 2004), p. 2.
“Heroes aren’t athletes who set new sports records, or Hollywood actors who make ‘daring’ films or politicians who make bold promises. Heroes are people who place themselves at risk for the benefit of others.”
— Oliver North (b. 1943), political commentator and former US Marine
“…[C]urrent lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable. A shift is necessary, which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations…”
— Maurice Strong , opening speech at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development
“If we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”
– Daniel Webster (1782-1852), Secretary of State and politician
“Do not expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
— Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), American president
“They’re blaming it [global warming] on humans, which is crazy. We’re not the cause of it.”
— Dr. William Gray, CSU weather researcher/predictor (AP, The Colorado Springs Gazette, 4/28/07, p. A9).
“We don’t know one millionth of one percent of anything.”
— Thomas Edison (1847-1931), American scientist/inventor/businessman
“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be.”
— Socrates (ca 470-399 BC), foundational Greek philosopher
“A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do.”
— President Woodrow Wilson, (1956-1924)
“I don’t have any friends. Every friend that I’ve had, practically, has wanted to borrow money or something and of course once they borrow money from you, you cant’ be friends anymore.”
— Jack Whitaker, West Virginia’s winner of the 2002 Powerball lottery ($315 million).
“Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear”
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, Sept. 1979, “Time” magazine (8/23/07)
“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), British journalist, satirist and Christian apologist
“Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love – and now become as the most hated one – the one – You have thrown away as unwanted – unloved. I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer – no One on Whom I can cling – no, No One. – Alone … Where is my Faith – even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness – My God – how painful is this unknown pain – I have no Faith – I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony. “So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them – because of the blasphemy – If there be God – please forgive me – When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven – there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. – I am told that God loves me – and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, Sept. 1979, “Time” magazine (8/23/07)
“Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), British journalist, satirist and Christian apologist
“I’m searching for loopholes.”
— Actor W. C. Fields, (1880-1946), speaking to a friend shortly before his death about why he was reading a Bible
“We’re either going to save the world or no one will be saved.” l
— Maurice Strong, Canadian businessman and internationalist http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/maurice_strong.htm
“Private opinion creates public opinion…That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.”
— Jan Struther (Joyce Anstruther/Placzek, 1901-53), British poet
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist, poet and Transcendentalist leader
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring about?”
— Maurice Strong, Canadian businessman and internationalist http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/maurice_strong.html
“It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; it is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in allusion of rapid global warming. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus…. I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, i.e., Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you ‘believe in.’ It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril… In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not falling.”
— John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel on the frenzy over Global Warming, http://www.kusi.com/home/11131801.html
“Everyone thinks of changing the world. No one thinks of changing himself.”
— Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist, pacifist/anarchist, educational reformer and philosopher
Family dinners are “more important than church attendance, more important even than grades at school… [E]very year, eating supper together regularly as a family tops the list of variables that are within our control… Supper is about nourishment of all kinds.”
— Miriam Weinstein’s, The Surprising Power of Family Meals (Mark Earley, BreakPoint, 11/23/07)
“We’re brainwashing our children…They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous… We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was… The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures… It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong… But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.”
— Dr. William Gray, Colorado State University professor and hurricane forecaster, at UNC lecture 10/07 http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/gore-gets-a-cold-shoulder/2007/10/13/1191696238792.html
“In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
— Unknown
“You know how many seeds are in an apple. But you don’t know how many apples are in a seed.”
— Rev. Robert Schuller (b. 1926), former Crystal Cathedral senior pastor
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born theoretical physicist
“Divorce is bad for the environment… ‘Not only the United States, but also other countries, including developing countries such as China and places with strict religious policies regarding divorce, are having more divorced households. The consequent increases in consumption of water and energy and using more space are being seen everywhere,’ said Jianguo ‘Jack’ Liu, of MSU’s Fisheries and Wildlife. Among the findings: * In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting. * In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries. * The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000. * The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.”
— http://newsroom.msu.edu/site/indexer/3268/content.htm
“Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.”
— President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than attempting to satisfy them.”
— Utilitarian American philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
“The ocean-atmosphere is the most complex physical system humans have to deal with. Meteorologists use computer models to forecast the weather. With the most complex models and fastest computers, weather forecasts are useful out to only about 10 days. Beyond that, they give results that have no relation to reality. Predicting climate variability is more difficult….So look skeptically at anyone who says they can model the climate 50 years in the future. Exhibit A is the forecast for the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. According to the best models and best authorities it was supposed to be an acive and severe tropical storm season. The reality was that is was one of the most benign….The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperature-0wise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week.”
— Gene J. Pfeffer, member of the American Meteorologist Society, “The (Colorado Springs) Gazette”, 8/1/07, p. M7.
“Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what is.’ I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think, ‘God, it’s got to be more than this.’ I mean this isn’t, this can’t be what it’s all cracked up to be.” What’s the answer? “I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I love playing football and I love being quarterback for this team. But at the same time, I think there are a lot of other parts about me that I’m trying to find.”
— Tom Brady, New England Patriot quarterback, 60 Minutes interview 12/23/07, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/03/60minutes/main1008main1008148_page3.shtml
“A little integrity is better than any career.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1883), American essayist/poet and Transcendentalist movement leader
“[M]y religious [i.e., Christian] belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave.”
— Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson (1824-1863), Confederate General
“In practice, communism is nothing less than sheer barbarism that makes even the horrors of Nazism pale in comparison. Professor Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii outlines that barbarism in his book Death by Government, a comprehensive detailing of the roughly 170 million people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century. From 1917 to its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union murdered about 62 million of its own people. During Mao Zedong’s reign, 35,236,000, possibly more, Chinese citizens were murdered. By comparison, Hitler’s Nazis managed to murder 21 million of its citizens and citizens in nations they conquered. Adding these numbers to the 60 million lives lost in war makes the 20th Century mankind’s most brutal era…. The very attempt to achieve the utopian goals of communism requires the ruthless suppression of the individual and an attack on any institution that might compromise the loyalty of the individual to the state. That’s why one of the first orders of business for communism, and those who support its ideas, is the attack on religion and the family.”
— Walter Williams, “The [Colorado Springs] Gazette”, 8/16/06, p. M6 (reprinted in The American Christian College Journal, 11/06, p. 6)
“Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.”
— Hesketh Pearson (1887-1964), British biographer
“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”
— “The 10 Cannots” by William J. H. Boetcker (1873 – 1962) German born American religious leader and influential public speaker
[Speaking about politics, but it could apply to several things:] “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
— George Orwell (pen name for Eric Arthur Blair), (1903-1950), British author and journalist
“Political correctness is the art of almost saying something true.”
— Dr. Ergun Caner, President of Liberty Seminary
“Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”
— Polycarp (~69-~155), Apostolic Father and early martyr www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2008/feb21.html
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born theoretical physicist
“Basically, I wanted redemption for the way I lived my life beforehand, and that was the drugs, the drink, the loose sex, whatever…”
— Elton John (b. 1948), rock icon/singer/musician, on why he is helping so many with AIDS through charity work (in 2008)
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born theoretical physicist
“Folks, with 70% of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi[sexual], we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.”
— Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 2/08 at NGLTF’s annual conference (Ed Vitagliano – AFA Journal, April 2008 (http://www.onenewsnow.com/Journal/stories.aspx?id=73945)
“A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is.”
— Karl Krauss (1874-1936), Czech-born ethnic Jewish writer and critic of the Third Reich
“There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy, and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs… There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”
— Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), former slave, educator and African-American leader in “My Larger Education” (1911)
“In a quest to lower my impact on the environment, I calculated our [family’s] carbon footprint if we cut our use of electricity and natural gas in half, switched our two cars for a single Toyota Prius and reduced our annual mileage by half, tripled our train travel, and never took an airplane. Furthermore, what if we became vegetarians, ate only local organic food in season, bought only second-hand clothes, furniture and appliances, never went to movies, bars or restaurants, and recycled or composted all our waste? Even then our combined carbon footprint would be 7.3 tons per year, but that would get us just below the world average of 4 tons per capita annually… The creators of Carbon Footprint claim that everyone in the world must eventually emit no more than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per year. When did Americans last emit so little carbon dioxide? Around 1870.”
— Ronald Bailey (b. 1953), science editor of Reason magazine (The Patriot Post, 05 May 2008)