Apologists Quotes & Sayings

This is what the Apologists can teach us about the world, culture, and philosophy. The pendulum steadily swings between contempt and wonder. The aim is not compromise between these stances, rather we need both the extremes of the swing simultaneously. Each extreme taken on its own is too confined for Christian teaching, and so: neither unconditional rejection, nor unconditional embrace. — Dariusz Karlowicz

Let Southern oppressors tremble-let their secret abettors tremble-let their Northern apologists tremble-let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble. — William Lloyd Garrison

Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it? — E. Haldeman-Julius

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their — Noam Chomsky

Defend the Hope When Peter commanded these believers to give a defense, what were they supposed to defend? Traditional apologists are almost unanimous here. They say the first order of business is "reasoning for the existence of God."116 Craig says we are to defend the plausibility of God's existence as being more likely than not.117 That is not at all what Peter was saying in 1 Peter 3:15. Rather, he was commanding all Christians to give a defense for "the hope" that was in them. And what was their "hope"? It was not the plausibility of God's existence as being more likely than not. Their hope was in Christ. — Clifford B. McManis

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time. — Walter Kaufmann

There may be no English word as bent and broken by casual misuse, or drained of blood by idealizing admirers and apologists, or grossly caricatured by huckstering detractors, as church. — Craig Keen

Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the
benevolent state is our protector and that without it wed be at the mercy of
monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does
more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the
world ... by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and
everywhere. — Sheldon Richman

We will preach the truth to a new generation: The doorway to all freedoms is framed with muskets. It's time the apologists step aside and let freedom's followers lead the way. — Charlton Heston

In these pages, it is my intention to make many people - not only Muslims but also Western apologists for Islam - uncomfortable. I am not going to do this by drawing cartoons. Rather, I intend to challenge centuries of religious orthodoxy with ideas and arguments that I am certain will be denounced as heretical. My argument is for nothing less than a Muslim Reformation. Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam's core concepts, I believe, we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion. I intend to speak freely, in the hope that others will debate equally freely with me on what needs to change in Islamic doctrine, rather than seeking to stifle discussion. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In an anxious attempt to justify Joseph Smith's use of seer stones, apologists have typically described them as mundane objects that only hold cultural significance. They have generally disregarded them as if they were unrelated to the Nephite interpreters and the seer stones described in the Book of Mormon by generations of prophets who valued them. This chapter will tie the threads of the previous chapters together in order to demonstrate that Joseph Smith's seer stones were sacred objects, connected to a broader Mormon understanding of the nature of God, ultimately making the argument that Joseph could not transcend the use of his seer stones. — Michael Hubbard MacKay

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve. — Hector Hugh Munro

Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for 'religious toleration' are arrogantly dishonest. — Newt Gingrich

Despite the best efforts of apologists like William Lane Craig, the 'evidence' for Christianity's truth is, in truth, not the kind that science will or should ever admit. We believers mean something different by the word: something that puts faith permanently in the category of irreproducible results. — Francis Spufford

The apologists for the medium claim that all sorts of interesting information is provided by television. This is true, but as it is much easier to produce programs that titillate rather than elevate the viewer, what most people watch is unlikely to help in developing the self. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained. — George Santayana

Reagan 's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else. — Bill Moyers

I'm running for president because I've had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok. — Dick Gephardt

We save the honor of Jesus when we restore His Person to life from the state of inanity to which the apologists have reduced it, and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly possessed. — Bruno Bauer

It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence. — Richard Dawkins

Many of Islam's apologists insist that suicide bombing is not Islamic because the Koran forbids suicide. Mmm-hmm. So where are all the Muslims gathering in mass demonstrations to vehemently condemn this practice that slanders their religion? Why does contemporary Islam promote 'martyrdom' as the highest duty of Muslims? Why are photographs of suicide bombers plastered everywhere in Beirut? Because Islam is what Islam does. — Jamie Glazov

The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped. — Richard Dawkins

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits. — H.G.Wells

It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue. — Peter Hitchens

Today the apologists of socialism are forced to distort facts and to misrepresent the manifest meaning of words when they want to make people believe in the compatibility of socialism and freedom. — Ludwig Von Mises

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.' — Salman Rushdie

One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency. The contrast is well exemplified in two exact contemporaries Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir; both highly intelligent and earnestly disposed. In all the fearful moral dilemmas of our time, Simone Weil never once went astray, whereas Simone de Beauvoir, with I am sure the best of intentions, has found herself aligned with apologists for some of the most monstrous barbarities and falsehoods of history. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Apologists for the profession contend that lawyers are as honest as other men, but this is not very encouraging. — Ferdinand Lundberg

However, it wouldn't matter much whether the universe is 13.7 billion years old, or 12.7 or 14.7, so it is hardly fine-tuned. If the universe were only 1.37 billion years old, then life on Earth or elsewhere would not yet have formed; but it might eventually. If the universe were 137 billion years old, life may have long ago died away; but it still could have happened. Once again, the apologists' blinkered perspective causes them to look at our current universe and assume that this is the only universe that could have life, and that carbon-based life is the only possible form of life. — Victor J. Stenger

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

We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it, that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls. — G.H. Hardy

It's not that Jackson had a "dark side," as his apologists rationalize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonialist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to constitute the core of US patriotism. The most revered presidents - Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama - have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

When Arab apologists wring their hands over an Israeli military incursion, they never mention what the Israelis are reacting to, or else diminish and distort it. — Jack Schwartz

Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. But there could be a fourth option - legend. — Bart D. Ehrman

Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations. — Joan Robinson

In the entire works of the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c. 100 CE), which constitute hundreds of pages, there are only two paragraphs that purport to refer to Jesus. Although much has been made of these 'references,' they have been dismissed by many scholars and even by Christian apologists as forgeries, as have been those referring to John the Baptist and James, 'brother' of Jesus. Bishop Warburton (1698-1779) labeled the Josephus interpolation regarding Jesus as 'a rank forgery, and a very stupid one, too. — D.M. Murdock

Even on the left, even in this age of exposed racial rifts, politicians still say with a straight face that this country was founded on principles of equality. Words mean things, we say again and again, but actions mean much more, and still as a nation, we worship the very slave owners who gave legal precedence to the notion of percentages of human beings. We scream equality and freedom while unabashedly modeling our action on the fathers of genocide. The only want to rationalize this most American of contradictions is to devalue the lives of the slaughtered, as was done then, so it must be now, and so apologists remind us that those were the times, and they didn't know better, and one and one. But if those lives matter now then they mattered then, and the clapback stretches through history, unraveling all the creation myths this country has always held most sacred, toppling our many false idols and cleaning out our profaned temples. — Daniel Jose Older

Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless ... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment. — John Dewey

In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture. — Azar Nafisi

Cromwell saw that the destruction of these men would not only ruin Ormonde's military power, but spread a helpful terror throughout the island. He therefore resolved upon a deed of "frightfulness" deeply embarrassing to his nineteenth-century admirers and apologists. Having — Winston S. Churchill

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry? — Azar Nafisi

Moderate' Muslims, and apologists and propagandists for Islam, will attempt to deny or obscure the real meaning, nature, and intent of jihad. Some will say that jihad means only a Muslim's 'inner struggle' to be a better person, and that jihad has no military meaning whatever. Others will acknowledge that Muslims have a religious duty to spread Islam throughout the world, but insist that it is to be spread only peacefully, through dawah - literally 'the call' - meaning persuasion and reasoning. Finally, some will go so far as to admit that it can also mean warfare, but insist that in Islam, warfare is allowed only in self-defense or against oppression. However, all of these assertions are examples of a tactic that Islam encourages in waging jihad: taqiyya or Kithman - 'lying,' 'deception,' 'deceit.' Muslims are encouraged to lie if, in the opinion of the liar, telling the lie will be 'good' for Islam. This is a documented fact according to both ancient and modern scholars of Islam. — Brigitte Gabriel

My friend J. Warner Wallace is one of the most thoughtful and winsome apologists for the gospel I know. Cold-Case Christianity is literally packed with insights to share with the skeptics in your life, and this book will give you the confidence to share it! Dr. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church — J. Warner Wallace

Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger's case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him. — Roger Scruton

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise. — Steven Pinker

There is no shortage of apologists for the ubiquitous highway crud. — James Howard Kunstler

The apologists for space science always seem over-impressed by engineering trivia and make far too much of non-stick frying pans and perfect ball-bearings. To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers. — James Lovelock

We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West's high horse, because we've earned the right to sit in that saddle. — Jonah Goldberg

The theologians,
the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed
statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for
me by the grind of stern reality! — Thomas Hardy

As these quotations are examined and exposed, it will become quite clear that those Jesus mythicists citing the Church Fathers in such a fashion are not competent students on the subject of Christianity's origins. They have merely copied accusations from less than reliable sources without concern for whether their citations were interpreted properly or even existed. Nor have they ever bothered investigating the responses given by Christian apologists to these quotes. That it attacks Christianity is enough for them. — Albert McIlhenny

Balaam's ass is the patron saint of apologists. Madness, as we shall see, is an appropriate term for the unreality of unbelief. — Os Guinness

Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of Rahab's lie, to where Cain got his wife. (Note to well-meaning apologists: it's not always the best idea to present a skeptic with a five-hundred-page book listing hundreds of apparent contradictions in Scripture when the skeptic didn't even know that half of them existed before you recommended it.) — Rachel Held Evans

The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: 'If you seek his monument, look around.' — Ludwig Von Mises

There is no ground whatever for the claim, so often made by religious apologists, that these ideals are specifically Christian and originated with Jesus. What were specifically Christian were some of the less enlightened teachings, which have done untold harm. Christians claim that organised Christianity has been a great force for good, but this view can be maintained on one assumption only: that everything good in the Christian era is a result of Christianity and everything bad happened in spite of it. — Margaret E. Knight

Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain. — A.C. Grayling

If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again ... — Christopher Hitchens

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead. — Martin Amis

Conservatives or better, pro- corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like " progress ," " opportunity ," and " individualism " into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right ... This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today. — Bill Moyers

Finally, Christians were accused of being subversive, for they refused to worship the emperor and thus destroyed the very fiber of society. The apologists answered that it was true that they refused to worship the emperor or any other creature, but that in spite of this they were loyal subjects of the empire. What the emperor needs - they said - is not to be worshiped, but to be served; and those who serve him best are those who pray for him and for the empire to the only true God. — Justo L. Gonzalez

The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggests that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: Si monumentum requires, circumspice. — Ludwig Von Mises

Speak out, educate, do not be intimidated by the apologists, and do not let extreme racism be mainstreamed. Hopefully there will come a time when we don't need to tell our kids that Halloween is no excuse for hate, and that blackface has no place in a civilized society. — Christine Pelosi

And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies - racism, leader worship, superstition - assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists). — Christopher Hitchens

The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory. — Karl Marx

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. — George Santayana

The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. "If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are." "If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted." "If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitievely debunked, we can go right on assuming it's truth." No, you can't. — Robert M. Price

While the Christian message is increasingly becoming less acceptable in fashionable society, we must be always living according to Scripture and prepared to be apologists for Jesus Christ in all aspects of our lives. — Jonathan Falwell

One of the questions I have been asked many times since this story broke is this: Now that the facts are out there, what can we do? My answer, depressing and cynical as it may be, is always the same. Not much. Not now. And certainly not until the American public and its Congressional representatives regain control of the CIA and shred the curtain of secrecy that keeps us from discovering these crimes of state until its too late.
Perhaps when the government officials who presided over these outrages are safely in their crypts, and their apologists and cheerleaders are buried woth them, future historians can finally call these men to account for the miseries they caused. Even if that's all that ever happens, it will be fitting and just, because the favorable judgment of history is ultimately what they craved. — Gary Webb

For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy. — Azar Nafisi

The connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American "greatness", to hierarchies of race, to the perils of "other" revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom. — Edward W. Said

It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy. — Michal Kalecki

The Islamophobia phobes, (ph) the writers and the editors and the talking heads who deny an existence of evil while blaming those who speak up. There no difference - different than the apologists for communism. As communism killed millions, they, they denied it. — Greg Gutfeld

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad. — Jincy Willett

He said He was God, in many ways and at many times in the Gospels. If this was not true, that would make Him either an insane fool, if He believed it, or a blasphemous liar, if He didn't. His miracles, like His holiness, His love, and His wisdom, make it impossible to call Him a lunatic or a liar; therefore we must call Him Lord. This is the "Lord, liar, or lunatic" argument made famous by C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell. It goes back to St. Thomas, to the early Christian apologists like St. Justin Martyr, and, as St. Thomas shows here, implicitly to Christ Himself. — Peter Kreeft

To proceed with the Biblical curiosities. Naturally you will think the threat to punish Adam and Eve for disobeying was of course not carried out, since they did not create themselves, nor their natures nor their impulses nor their weaknesses, and hence were not properly subject to anyone's commands and not responsible to anybody for their acts.It will surprise you to know that the threat was carried out. Adam and Eve were punished and that crime finds apologists unto this day.The sentence of death was executed. — Mark Twain

No man who has played a role on the world stage has ever been without his detractors, and only a few have been without their apologists. — Emmuska Orczy

I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent. — Robert M. Price

The church does not need apologists of its causes nor crusaders of its battles, but sowers humble and confident of the truth, who ... trust of its power — Pope Francis

La Raza stands for 'The Race' - and they say so openly. They are a pro-Hispanic organization; I will call them a racist organization. They base their philosophy on race. They advocate for those minorities that fit within the category that they define as drives them. They are apologists for illegal immigrants - and we are funding them with your tax dollars in this administration through earmarks. It is outrageous. It's an in-your-face act on the part of this Congress. — Steve King

Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosophy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises. — PZ Myers

A majority, perhaps as many as 75 percent, of abortion clinics are in areas with high minority populations. Abortion apologists will say this is because they want to serve the poor. You don't serve the poor, however, by taking their money to terminate their children. — Alveda King

Borgian apologists, some of them, admit that Pope Alexander was a thoroughly bad man, but they defend him on the ground that he was no worse than his predecessors or than several of his immediate successors in the Papal Chair. This may be true, but it does not excuse the Pope. In accepting the position he held, he, like every other Pope, was bound to be a living representative, a "Vicar" of Christ, and no Pope could ever have been so completely ignorant of the life and teaching of his Divine Master as to suppose he was leading the life and setting the example which the whole Christian world had a right to expect from him when he was living as Alexander lived. In fact Alexander VI., in his better moments, deplored his crimes and shortcomings, confessed them to be worthy of condign punishment, and promised amendment and " the reform of the Church in its head and in its members. — Arnold Harris Mathew

If President Obama has his way, you won't recognize the government, the free market system, or, frankly, America as you once knew it. His admonitions and his audacious policy goals demonstrate very clear motives: equalize, discourage dissent, and become a nation of apologists. — Bob Ehrlich

The other danger is that apologists put so much effort into what they do that they may end up not so much defending the faith because they believe it is true as believing the faith is true because they have worked so hard and long to defend it. — Frederick Buechner

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