Churchmen Quotes & Sayings

Those who came to the United States didn't realize they were white until they got here. They were told they were white. They had to learn they were white. An Irish peasant coming from British imperial abuse in Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s, arrives in the United States. You ask him or her what they are. They say, "I am Irish." No, you're white. "What do you mean, I am white?" And they point me out. "Oh, I see what you mean. This is a strange land." — Cornel West

This document [the Reconstruction and Development Programme] was translated into a simpler manifesto called 'A Better Life for All', which in turn became the ANC's campaign slogan. — Nelson Mandela

Churchmen, eh? Love one minute, forgiveness the next, and then it's eternity on fire. — Mark Lawrence

Sports is like a war without the killing. — Ted Turner

In all of these centuries there has not been the slightest shadow of change in the nature of God or in His attitude toward sin.
The Bible teaches from the beginning to the end that adultery and fornication are sin, and the attitude of churchmen does not alter its character. — Billy Graham

The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine. — Jeanette Winterson

A corpse was merely an empty vessel for the spirit it had housed. "The soul," he'd said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, "is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that's where it will go. — Robert Masello

Churchmen are quick to defend religious freedom; lawyers were never so universally aroused as by President Roosevelt's Court bill; newspapers are most alert to civil liberties when there is a hint of press censorship in the air. And educators become perturbed at every effort to curb academic freedom. But too seldom do all of these become militant when ostensibly the rights of only one group are threatened. They do not always react to the truism that when the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes. — Earl Warren

Fearsome Beasts and Strange Creatures Wonders in Paper and Mist — Erin Morgenstern

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway. — Thomas Lennon

In churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty. — Victor Hugo

Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again. — Jefferson Davis

Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church. — Leo Tolstoy

Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. — Rod Dreher

When it reaches a blockage, water find the easiest path around the blockage, or it continues to assemble, and flows over the blockage. — Frederick Lenz

If I had to vote for the bill again, I'd vote for it tomorrow. — Mary Landrieu

I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize. — Danny Strong

Extremist groups like People for the American Way attack Christians who run for public office as a threat to the 'separation of church and state,' though they never specify why conservatives are any more of a threat than churchmen and church women on the Left who have led religiously inspired causes for decades. — Ronald H. Nash

But the churchmen fain would kill their church, As the churches have kill'd their Christ. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors.A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness. — David Mitchell

My meaning, is, that churchmen in peace and quiet pray to Heaven for the welfare of the world, but we soldiers and knights carry into effect what they pray for, defending it with the might of our arms and the edge of our swords, not under shelter but in the open air, a target for the intolerable rays of the sun in summer and the piercing frosts of winter. Thus are we God's ministers on earth and the arms by which his justice is done therein. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

In any match, there are few critical moments where there's no second best decision. The rest of the moves are intuitive. — Viswanathan Anand

The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me ... The pageantry of the Roman Church that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me, churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at all. — Mary Catherwood

English churchmen have long gazed with love on the primitive church as the ideal of Christian perfection, the Eden wherein the first fathers of their faith walked blameless before God and passionless towards each other. — Sabine Baring-Gould

The modern way with God is to set him at a distance, if not to deny him altogether; and the irony is that modern Christians, preoccupied with maintaining religious practices in an irreligous world, have themselves allowed God to become remote ... for churchmen who look at God through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy proportions, cannot hope to end up as more than pigmy Christians. — J.I. Packer

Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

All too many churchmen view the undisciplined & amoral products of statist education as evidences of the failure of these schools. On the contrary, they are evidences of their success. — Rousas John Rushdoony

In my experience, his reaction was typical of many churchmen when lay people like myself try to explain the irrational using the 'God's Plan' argument. They raise an eyebrow and look at you as if you're slightly bonkers. — Arthur Matthews

Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a 'nobler', more 'naturally' aristocratic dimensions than the 'coarse' and 'bestial' Hutus. On the 'nasal index' for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose. — Philip Gourevitch

Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

No churchmen, I notice. Of course not. What use have they for a world without irrational fear? — Jonathan L. Howard

It is often lamented by the churchmen that Washington and Lincoln possessed little religion except that found in the word 'God.' All that can here be affirmed is that what the religion of those two men lacked in theological details it made up in greatness. Their minds were born with a love of great principles ... There are few instances in which a mind great enough to reach great principles in politics has been satisfied with a fanatical religion ... It must not be asked for Washington and Lincoln that, having reached greatness in political principles, they should have loved littleness in piety. — David Swing

But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy. productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. — David Mitchell

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. — Martin Luther King Jr.