"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.