"A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future."

-- Sidney J. Harris

"Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way."

-- P.J. O'Rourke, "The End of the Affair" in the Wall Street Journal

"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."

-- J. Frank Dobie

"You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it."

-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"Push back against dubious claims that defy logic;
be on the lookout for misrepresentations;
question the lack of science when belief is the substitution;
be very skeptical when the denial of the laws of physics comes into play."

--- jpaik, quoted from Audio Karma

"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything."

-- Frank Dane

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love."

-- Søren Kierkegaard

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

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

-- G.K. Chesterton

"Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest person, it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow."

--Edward Sandford Martin

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us."

-- Paul Valery, 1895, French critic & poet (1871 - 1945)

"The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too."

-- Oscar Levant

"In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise."

-- Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the United States Senate

"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

“I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!”

-- Will Rogers

"What, after all, are the world's deepest problems? They are what they always have been, the individual's problems--the meaning of life and death, the mastery of self, the quest for value and worth-whileness and freedom within, the transcending of loneliness, the longing for love and a sense of significance, and for peace. Society's problems are deep, but the individual's problems go deeper; Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, or Shakespeare will show us that, if we hesitate to take it from the Bible."

-- James I. Packer (b.1926), "Jesus Christ the Lord: The 
   New Testament Doctrine of the Incarnation"

"Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder."

-- Leon Kass, medical ethicist, arguing against human cloning

"'Help!'
    
'Sorry! 'monmywaytochurch.'
    
The deepest sins are camouflaged as holiness."

-- Kenneth L. Pike (1912-2001)

"One of the biggest blows to Christianity's vitality and legitimacy occurred on the day that Constantine made it the official religion of the Empire. Nobody in his or her right mind would want to be a member of a socially acceptable religion. It's very dangerous for the soul."

-- Phyllis Tickle

"When I was a delegate at the 1975 Assembly of the World Council of Churches I found over and over again that it was when we said what we really meant, expressing ourselves and our viewpoints most clearly, that real fellowship and trust came about — not when we hid the light of truth under a bushel of tolerance."

-- N.T. Wright

"Never in my 15 years at 'Charisma' have I known a time of such intense spiritual turbulence. ...recent religious scandals have so tarnished our credibility that we have become a curious freak show. Many unbelievers now associate ministers with wife-swapping, wife-beating, no-fault divorce, gay affairs and $10,000-a-night hotel rooms. We need a Holy Ghost housecleaning."

-- J. Lee Grady, editor of "Charisma" magazine.

"If you cannot convince them, confuse them."

-- Harry S. Truman (my first cousin, twice removed)

"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

"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