"I have held many things in my hands, and have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess."

-- Martin Luther

"Christianity is a battle, not a dream."

-- Wendell Phillips (1811-1884)

"The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on."

--Robert Bloch

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber-barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber-baron's cruelty may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

-- C.S. Lewis

"You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you in no way let yourself become established in the situation of the world, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are Christian only when you believe you have a role to play in the realization of the new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life."

-- Henri Nouwen

"The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."

-- Bill Bernbach

"The wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection.... I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds. Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness---mine, yours, ours---need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life."

-- Parker Palmer

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."

-- Douglas Adams

"Nice is highly overrated."

--Marcus Baker

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

"If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein

"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."

-- Kurt Vonnegut

"The Holy Spirit of the eternal God has come. The Spirit is here: living in us, sanctifying us, strengthening us, consoling us…. The center of all reality, the innermost heart of all infinity, the love of the all-holy God has become our center, our heart. True and absolute reality now lives in our nothingness; the strength of God vitalizes our weakness: eternal life lives in mortal human beings. The only thing that nightfall really means now is that we cannot grasp the meaning of the day that has dawned on us since Pentecost—the day that will see no sunset."

-- Karl Rahner, SJ

"We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version (King James Bible), if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations."
-- C. S. Lewis

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

-- Bertrand Russell

"No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn."

-- Lyndon B. Johnson

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."

-- Stephen Hawking

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

-- Arthur C. Clarke

“The power of clear vision is called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Our relation to God is unrighteous. Secretly we are ourselves the masters in this relationship. We are not concerned with God, but with our own requirements, to which God must adjust Himself. Our arrogance demands that, in addition to everything else, some super-world should also be known and accessible to us. Our conduct calls for some deeper sanction, some approbation and remuneration from another world.

"Our well-regulated, pleasurable life longs for some hours of devotion, some prolongation into infinity. And so, when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. In "believing" on Him, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves."
   
-- Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans