"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

"Don't criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes; that way when you criticize him you're a mile away and have his shoes."

-- Unknown

"I was raised in the Hebrew persuasion, but I converted to Narcissism."

-- Woody Allen, Scoop

"It is wrong to suppose that for Paul faith is a meritorious act on man's part, which wins salvation, or even, in a more modern way of speech, a creative moral principle in itself. 

Paul does not, in fact, speak (when he is using the language strictly) of "justification by faith," but of "justification by grace through faith," or "on the grounds of faith." This is not mere verbal subtlety. It means that the "righteousness of God" becomes ours, not by the assertion of the individual will as such, but by the willingness to let God work."
  
-- C. Harold Dodd

"If only we could agree that Scripture is 'God's Word written', that it is supreme in its authority over all human traditions however venerable, and that it must be allowed to reform and renew the church, we would take an immediate leap forward in ecumenical relationships. Reformation according to the Word of God is indispensable to reunion."

-- John R.W. Stott, "The Contemporary Christian"

"Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V."

-- V's introduction to Evey

"The self-sins... dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins--egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion--are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders, even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel.

I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice."

-- A. W. Tozer

"Loyalty to your country always; Loyalty to your government when it deserves it."

-- Mark Twain

"We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it."

-- Jerry Garcia

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

-- Oliver Cromwell, to the so-called Rump Parliament in 1653.

"A more-self-contained, energetic, sincere artist I never saw. His talent amazed me; unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, not altogether wrong in holding the world to be detestable, but who does not make it any more enjoyable either for himself or others by his attitude."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), speaking of Ludwig van Beethoven

"If you are on the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction."

- - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"It is a poor sort of faith that imagines Christ defeated by anything men can do."

-- Joy Davidman

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

-- Anne Lamott

"What are these churches now if they are not
the tombs and sepulchres of God?"

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Faith is the human attitude of receptivity which takes what God, in his grace, holds out."

-- Ralph Martin

“Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Many would be cowards if they had courage enough."

-- Thomas Fuller
English clergyman & historian (1608 - 1661)

"The church wants so much to be the Chaplain of American Culture that they are willing to bless anything that the American Culture decrees as good."

-- David Roseberry

"But when once Christ had called him, Peter had no alternative: he must leave the ship and come to Him. In the end, the first step of obedience proves to be an act of faith in the word of Christ.

But we should completely misunderstand the nature of grace if we were to suppose that here was no need to take the first-step, because faith was already there.

Against that, we must boldly assert that the step of obedience must be taken before faith can be possible. Unless he obeys, a man cannot believe."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

-- Moshe Dyan

"The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love; but if the soul cannot yet feel this longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God."

-- Meister Eckhart

"Quando omni flunkus moritati"
(if all else fails, play dead)

-- anonymous...and doubtful.

"Force is always, and everywhere, a sign of fear--that is, a sign of weakness. Behind the vast armies and navies which we call the great powers of the world, there is fear. Fear it is that drives us out to war. Fear is the father of ferocity, and the forger of the sword. From the Creative point of view, which is God's point of view, force is weakness, and only Love is power."

-- G. A. Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929),
The Wicket Gate [1923]

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."

-- Edward Abbey

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."

--Edward R. Murrow

"We usually think of the preacher and worship leaders as performers and the congregation as the audience. That’s a misnomer. In fact, the preacher, worship leaders and each person in the congregation are performers. God is the audience."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

When the Bible speaks of "following Jesus," it is proclaiming a discipleship which will liberate mankind from all man-made dogma, from every burden and oppression, from every anxiety and torture which afflicts the conscience. If they follow Jesus, men escape from the hard yoke of their own laws, and submit to the kindly yoke of Jesus Christ. But does this mean that we can ignore the seriousness of His command? Far from it! We can only achieve perfect liberty and enjoy fellowship with Jesus when His command, His call to absolute discipleship, is appreciated in its entirety.

Only the man who follows the command of Jesus without reserve, and submits unresistingly to His yoke, finds his burden easy, and under its gentle pressure receives the power to persevere in the right way. The command of Jesus is hard--unutterably hard--for those who try to resist it.

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

"Everything preaches."

-- Martin Luther

"The excellent is new forever."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A word to the wise ain't necessary. It's the stupid ones who need the advice"

-- Bill Cosby

"But when once Christ had called him, Peter had no alternative:
he must leave the ship and come to Him. In the end, the first
step of obedience proves to be an act of faith in the word of Christ.

But we should completely misunderstand the nature of grace
if we were to suppose that here was no need to take the first-step,
because faith was already there.

Against that, we must boldly assert that the step of obedience
must be taken before faith can be possible. Unless he obeys,
a man cannot believe."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"The only people who can understand the importance of Evangelism are those who have been evangelized themselves. They have a before and an after, and they know the difference. They also know who caused the difference."

-- P. Michael Summer

“It’s impossible to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.”

--Upton Sinclair

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

("Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.")

-- Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)

"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

-- George Orwell

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

- - Oscar Wilde

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."

-- Jaroslav Pelikan

"Ecce homo."

-- Pontius Pilate

“Remember this: Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”

-- William Sloane Coffin

"From my rotting body flowers shall grow, and I am in them and that is eternity."

-- Edvard Munch

"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

-- John 20:14

"You are going to face death some day. You are going to face that last moment, barring Christ's return, where you are going to be terrified of sin, death, and the devil. And at that point you are either going to say, 'I have lived the victorious life' or you are going to say, 'Dearest Jesus, forgive me! I am a beggar and a sinner!' I would say you either say the latter, or you will not spend eternity with Him in heaven."

--Pastor Matt Harrison, LCMS World Relief

"In the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by."

-- Archilochos, 7th Century BC

"Every Christian without exception is a believer, a lover and a hoper (not necessarily an optimist, since 'optimism' is a matter of temperament, 'hope' of theology). Faith, hope and love are thus sure evidences of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. Together they completely reorientate our lives, as we find ourselves being drawn up towards God in faith, out towards others in love and on towards the parousia in hope. The new birth means little or nothing if it does not pull us out of our fallen introversion and redirect us towards God, Christ and our fellow human beings."

-- John R. W. Stott

"Sometimes the worst evil is done by good people who do not know that they are not good."

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

"Gort, Klaatu barada nikto."

-- Klaatu

"Christianity is over in the West because wealth kills Christianity. The West is wealth."

-- Stanley Hauerwas

"Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death."

-- Paul of Tarsus, Apostle to the Greeks

"If you are on the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We may look into a church, almost any church, and discover someone who, though he is offered a gospel of love, must subtly convert it into a gospel of hate before he can receive it. The gospel of love--with its emphasis upon brotherhood, equality before God, the dignity of every human being, and man's social responsibility toward man--does not satisfy the lack that he urgently feels. That calls for something altogether different, for an assurance that he is superior, that he is right where others are wrong--a kind of cosmic teacher's pet."

-- Bonaro W. Overstreet

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left."

-- Oscar Levant