“Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

-- Hugh Latimer

"Water is for washing your feet. Beer is for drinking."

-- Kosmo Spoetzl

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

- Douglas Adams

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

-- Oliver Cromwell

"The opening chords are from the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony. It goes from there to a Skip James motif. Following that it moves to a Gregorian chant, Dies Irae. It's the most scary one in the Episcopal hymn books, it's all about the day of judgment. Then it returns to the Vaughan Williams chords, followed by a blues run of undetermined origin, then back to Skip James and so forth."

-- John Fahey, describing his piece, "Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border" as found on the album Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes.

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"

-- Charles M. Schulz

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

-- Stephen Jay Gould

"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."

--H. L. Mencken

"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with."

--Tennessee Williams

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

"Failures are very public, and successes are short lived. It's the pleasure of drawing funny pictures that makes up for it."

--Bill Watterson
US cartoonist (1958 - )

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

-- Tom Lehrer

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

-- G. K. Chesterton

"Victory or death!"

-- Col. William Barret Travis

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

-- Lord Acton

"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."

-- Harry S. Truman

"Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable."

-- Samuel Johnson

“When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I am fifty and I haven't seen a thing.”

-- Erik Satie

"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised."

-- George F. Will

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."

-- Bertrand Russell

"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."

-- J.D. Salinger

"Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God."

-- Arvo Pärt

"Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness."

-- Cullen Hightower

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.

The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

--P. J. O'Rourke

"The church that doesn't evangelize will be evangelized by the culture in which it finds itself."

-- William Frey

"Something terrible happens, and you might say, “God help us!” or “Jesus Christ!”—the poor, crippled prayers that are hidden in the minor blasphemies of people for whom in every sense God is dead, except that they still have to speak to him, if only through clenched teeth."

-- Frederick Buechner

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."

-- G. K. Chesterton

"The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course."

-- A.A. Milne

"Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves."

-- Carl Sagan

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."

-- Karl Marx

"I also told them of the manner in which I had been knocked down and dragged out, and that I didn't consider it a fair fight any how they could fix it. I put the ingredients in the cup pretty strong I tell you, and I concluded my speech by telling them that I was done with politics for the present, and they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas."

-- Col. David Crockett

“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

-- Butch Hancock

"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."

-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.

Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.

Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?"

-- Soren Kierkegaard

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

-- Flannery O'Connor

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."

-- John Cage

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

-- Blaise Pascal

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."

-- Aldous Huxley

"Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left."

-- David M. Ogilvy

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"

--US Marine Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph "Dan" Daly

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."

-- Joseph Baretti

"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