Apologist Quotes & Sayings

What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst. — Lionel Blue

Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. — C.S. Lewis

I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith. — Robert M. Price

When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole. — Anna Quindlen

I am convinced, in the words of C. S. Lewis - who in my estimation is probably the greatest Christian apologist in recent memory - that the question of being an apologist is not so much whether you use an apologetic in answering someone's question, but whether the apologetic you already use is a good one. — Ravi Zacharias

You can't get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist. — Rachel Held Evans

The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died. — Stephen King

The role of the Christian apologist is not to re-invent Christianity; it would cease to be Christianity if I did! — Joe Boot

The biggest challenge was to make sure that we are looking at things honestly and truthfully. We weren't making an apologist film. That was the toughest part. — Cate Shortland

To read an expert contribution on growing up Muslim in America by Abdu Murray, a lawyer, apologist, former Shia Muslim, and author of two published books on Islam and other major worldviews, click here. — Nabeel Qureshi

Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth. — Ron Chernow

Grace is the mother and nurse of holiness, and not the apologist of sin. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

By reversing the proper order of things, the non-presuppositional apologist sees submission to God's Word as secondary, rather than primary, sees demonstration as the basis for faith, sees independent argumentation rather than the Holy Spirit as the source of conviction, and therefore advances the destruction of his own defense of the faith. — Greg L. Bahnsen

I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis. — A.C. Grayling

I don't want to be an apologist for poverty, but I can't stand waste, useless spending, wasted energy and having to live squandering stuff. — Jose Mujica

Christian apologists who argue that a story about an empty tomb is convincing evidence of a resurrected body are likely unfamiliar with Occam's razor, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. They assume that the most likely explanation is miraculous resurrection through some unproven divine connection, but more likely scenarios include a stolen body, a mismarked grave, a planned removal, faulty reports, creative storytelling, edited scriptures, etc. No magic required. — David G. McAfee

Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source ... To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide. — Ward Churchill

Each layman must be his own apologist, responsible for his stewardship of the Gospel in his daily life and work. — William Stringfellow

Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all. — Deepak Chopra

I am no apologist for Fidel's [Castro] regime. It is, after all, a totalitarian regime. So I would like to see that change. — John Gimlette

God is his own best apologist. — Os Guinness

Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder. — Karl Hess

I don't think I need to be an apologist for working hard and being a very large taxpayer. — Anthony Scaramucci

TV's Tony Snow becomes the White House press secretary. How will he make the difficult transition from Fox News reporter to Republican apologist? ... Mr. President, it is time to hire the folks who've never let you down. Limbaugh at Health and Human Services. Hannity at State. Then give Rummy the Medal of Freedom and install Bill O'Reilly as secretary of defense. Only problem, you might find yourself invading Vermont. And I'll replace Chertoff at Homeland Security. The man's done nothing to control the bear population. — Stephen Colbert

The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion. — Donald M. MacKinnon

The apologist is most entrusted with apologetics when capable of arguing his opponent's position better than his opponent. — Criss Jami

The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Christian apologist has become someone who is virtually expected to apologize for being a Christian, and that has to stop. — Richard Platt

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide. — Jocelyn Gibb

His true intention becomes clear by the choice of people he interviewed: every one of them a conservative apologist! — Robert M. Price

It is never just disagreement but always intellectual dishonesty that is the apologist's worst enemy. And its apprentice is ignorance. — Criss Jami

Size is important, no matter what our apologist sisters say. — Tom Robbins

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist. — Bono

When an apologist attempts to be autonomous in his reasoned argumentation he indicates that he considers God to be less certain than his own existence and that he places greater credence in his independent reasoning than in God's Word. — Greg L. Bahnsen

Some people are ignorant of the world but educated in Scripture, and are therefore prone to missing the relevance of Scripture - these sometimes, later, amidst life's challenges and doubts, turn from the faith; other people are ignorant of Scripture but educated in the world, and are therefore prone to missing the truth of Scripture - they are often those who ridicule the faith. The apologist stands somewhere in the center. He articulates where some are prone to understanding the truth in beauty, others the beauty in truth - that of a spiritual Creator in relation to his scientific creation. — Criss Jami

I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian. — Peter Kreeft

Perhaps myself the first, at some expense of popularity, to unfold the true character of Jefferson, it is too late for me to become his apologist. Nor can I have any disposition to do it. I admit that his politics are tinctured with fanaticism, that he is too much in earnest in his democracy, that he has been a mischievous enemy to the principle measures of our past administration, that he is crafty & persevering in his objects, that he is not scrupulous about the means of success, nor very mindful of truth, and that he is a contemptible hypocrite. — Alexander Hamilton

Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings. — H.L. Mencken

It is not that men become too intelligent for God,' says the Apologist, 'but rather they become too arrogant for intelligence. — Criss Jami

above all the temptation to think that God is no more certain than our best arguments for him. As C. S. Lewis admitted, I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our own hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments . . . from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. — Os Guinness

I'm a Lebanese woman who directs films. That's not it at all. I am not really a woman nor am I really an Arab. Because I am not an apologist for women, nor of sentimental "world" films. — Danielle Arbid

Fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist. — Gertrude Atherton

It is important for the apologist who desires to be obedient to the Word of God in defending the faith to pay special attention to the fact that throughout Scripture, God's veracity is not defended, but accepted from the outset on His authority. Unless we have more wisdom than that contained in the revelation of God, we should take the same attitude. — Greg L. Bahnsen

Clearly, Valdez was an apologist for the industrialists and polluters, the big American companies that dominated Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. Not surprising to find such a person here, since the CIA had controlled Costa Rica for decades. This wasn't a country; it was a subsidiary of American business interests. And American businesses did not give a damn for the environment. — Michael Crichton

It should not be forgotten in this connection that the minister's duty is increasingly that of an apologist for Christianity. The general level of education is much higher than it has ever been. Many young people hear of evolution in the high schools and in the college where their fathers never heard of it except as far as a distant something. If the minister would be able to help his young people, he must be a good apologete, and he cannot be a good apologete unless he is a good systematic theologian (pg. 24). — Cornelius Van Til

When you put your faith in big government, you end up an apologist for mass murder. — Karl Hess

Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off ... By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse. — Anthony Bourdain

Anything But An Apologist for the Lefties and All of Their Causes. — Frank Rich

Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes. — Timothy Noah

I once sheepishly asked a prominent Evangelical apologist, with his PhD in New Testament, if he had ever chanced to read Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined. He had not. Things began to become clear to me. He didn't know that all his trusty arguments had been thoroughly refuted many decades before he was born. — Robert M. Price

In the last essay he wrote before he died, great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis said, "We have no right to happiness; only an obligation to do our duty." Of course it is in our duty that happiness comes. Try it. — Billy Graham

In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw. — Frank McCourt

In March 2008, the Al-Arabiya news channel denounced my book The Truth about Muhammad, claiming that it contained "lies and hate." Its article quoted the Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong as saying that the book was "written in hatred" and contains "basic and bad mistakes of fact."8 The jihad terror group Hamas soon joined in the denunciation, thundering that my book was not just full of "lies," but was actually part of a "campaign by Western extremists against the religion of Islam and values that are sacred to Moslems," and was "another in a series of actions designed to distort the image of Islam in the public eye."9 — Robert Spencer