"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

--Flannery O'Connor

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

-- Julian of Norwich

"I was more convinced than ever that the preaching like an Apostle, without joining together those that are awakened and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer. How much preaching has there been for these twenty years all over Pembrokeshire! But no regular societies, no discipline, no order or connection; and the consequence is, that nine in ten of the once-awakened are now faster asleep than ever."

-- John Wesley's (1703-1791) Journal

"Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel."

-- H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962), The Kingdom of God in America [1959]

"I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this too I believe, that unless I first believe, I shall not understand."

-- Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109

"We can not have all things to please us,
no matter how we try.
Until we've all gone to Jesus,
we can only wonder why."

-- Gillian Welch

"I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches."

-- John Wesley

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."

-- Bill Vaughn

"I love Wikipedia … any site that's got a longer entry on truthiness than on Lutherans has its priorities straight."

-- Stephen Colbert

"Let all our chapels be built plain and decent; but not more expensively than is absolutely unavoidable: otherwise the necessity of raising money will make rich men necessary to us. But if so, we must be dependent upon them, yea, and governed by them. And then farewell to the Methodist-discipline, if not doctrine too."

-- John Wesley, from his instructions to American Methodist churches.

"And certain tiny primates could theoretically become airborne, possibly self-propelled, and maneuver their escape from lower-back regions of one's physical body. (See The Wizard of Oz)"

-- Chip

“The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing.”

-- Nancy Astor, British politician (1879 - 1964)

"Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; ... Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; ... Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; ..."

-- Louis Menard

"Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar."

-- Edward R. Murrow

"Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does."

-- Bill Nye

"One of the reasons the Reformation was such an urgent, bloody affair, was that those involved had to get things right with God before he came on his final tour of inspection in the Last Days."

-- Diarmaid MacCulloch

"It is astounding what God allows the human race to get away with, when lightning is so cheap."

-- Mark Twain

"The ‘wiles of the devil’ take many forms, but he is at his wiliest when he succeeds in persuading people that he does not exist. To deny his reality is to expose ourselves the more to his subtlety."

-- John R.W. Stott

"Sin is not what we do. Sin is who we are."

-- Nelson W. Koscheski

"You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men."

-- Max Beerbohm

"Not all chemicals are bad. Without hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer."

-- Dave Barry

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

-- Stephen Leacock

"Da man! You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in??"

-- Jack Abramoff, e-mail

"It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."

-- Stephen Hawking

"If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over 
our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms 
about their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for."

-- C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months, while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."

-- Cindy Sheehan

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

"Well, many of the songs, they aren't sad, they're hopeless."

-- Townes Van Zandt (1944-1997), after being asked why he only wrote sad songs.

"We are a deeply divided Communion. ... The decisions, actions, defiance and continuing intransigence of The Episcopal Church are at the heart of our crisis, the House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church (is) determined to pursue their own unbiblical agenda and exacerbate our current divisions. In the middle of all of this the Lord’s name has been dishonoured. If we fail to act, many will be lost to the church and thousands of souls will be imperilled. This we cannot and will not allow to happen."

-- The Most Revd. Peter J Akinola, CON, DD

Archbishop, Metropolitan and Primate of all Nigeria.

"We must be strong and we must be vigilant. But we also need to be smart, and getting smart means ending our infatuation with war and rediscovering the possibilities of politics."

-- Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, U.S. Army, Retired, professor of International Relations at Boston University, from an article in The American Conservative magazine, September 2006.

Professor Bacevich's son, First Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., U.S. Army, died in Iraq today from combat injuries.

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

-- GK Chesterton

"The Christian faith is good for the world because it provides the fixed standard which atheism cannot provide and because it provides forgiveness for sins, which atheism cannot provide either. We need the direction of the standard because we are confused sinners. We need the forgiveness because we are guilty sinners. Atheism not only keeps the guilt, but it also keeps the confusion."

-- Douglas Wilson

“There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.”

-- James Thurber

"I love my church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body, and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth."

-- Stephen Colbert of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going."

-- Retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan, explaining why he turned down White House feelers to become "war czar" for Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."

-- Elwood P. Dowd, from "Harvey"

"I feel so miserable without you;
it's almost like having you here."
-- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
-- John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness.
Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
-- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself;
he is the cause of dullness in others."
-- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
-- Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy."
-- Walter Kerr

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
-- Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
-- Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go;
others, whenever they go."
-- Oscar Wilde

"We can not have all things to please us,
no matter how we try.
Until we've all gone to Jesus,
we can only wonder why."

-- Gillian Welch

“Predation, is a biological interaction between species where a predator kills and eats its prey. Predators are either carnivores or omnivores. Herbivores are usually treated separately, but from an ecological perspective, the activities of the herbivorous species that kill the organism they feed on is functionally the same as predation.”

-- Wikipedia

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

-- Abraham Lincoln

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

-- George Orwell

"A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it."

--Thomas Pynchon

"I am Spartacus!"

-- Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

"Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, 'Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... "

"Now did the Lord say, 'First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.' "

--Monty Python and the Holy Grail

“Now about those ghosts. I'm sure they're here and I'm not half so alarmed at meeting up with any of them as I am at having to meet the live nuts I have to see every day.”

-- Bess Truman

"To preach the Gospel requires that the preacher should 
believe that he is sent to those whom he is addressing at the 
moment, because God has among them those whom He is at the 
moment calling; it requires that the speaker should expect a 
response."
  
-- Roland Allen 

"Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason because bad philosophy needs to be answered."

-- C.S. Lewis

"Evangelism is neither to convert people, nor to win them, nor to bring them to Christ, though this is indeed the first goal of evangelism. Evangelism is to preach the gospel."

-- John R.W. Stott

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

-- John Maynard Keynes

"Orthodoxy is, in the Church, very much what prejudice is in the single mind. It is the premature conceit of certainty. It is the treatment of the imperfect as if it were the perfect."

... Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

"The killing of the guilty is not the way to rebuild justice and reconcile society, rather there is a risk of nourishing the spirit of revenge and inciting fresh violence."

-- Fr. Federico Lombardi S.J., Vatican spokesperson, on the execution of Saddam Hussein.

"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying."

-- Bertrand Russell