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Favorite Quotes

"Another thing I appreciate about common grace is its irony.  God gives atheists not only food to eat and air to breathe, but the very minds and wills and logic that they use to argue against him.  The man who says God cannot be good since he allows suffering doesn't grasp that God is withholding from him the full extent of suffering he deserves for his evil, and that is the very thing that gives the man the luxury of formulating and leveling his accusations against God."

-- Randy Alcorn 

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"A Veteran -- whether active duty, discharged, retired, or reserve -- is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to The United States of America for an amount up to and including his life."

-- Anonymous

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"Eschew obfuscation!"

-- Anonymous

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"Faith without reason leads to superstition; reason without faith leads to cynicism."

-- Anonymous

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"Flatter me, I won't believe you.  Ignore me, I won't like you.  Encourage me, I'll never forget you."

-- Anonymous

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"Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people."

-- Anonymous

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"He who has the most toys when he dies.... dies."

-- Anonymous

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"He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool: shun him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is simple: teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep: wake him.

But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man: follow him."

-- Anonymous

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"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard isn't what I meant."

-- Anonymous (or, What a professor says when he doesn't really know the answer!)

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"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that somebody's not out to get you!"

-- Anonymous

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"Never allow someone to be your priority, while allowing yourself to be their option."

-- Anonymous

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"The new busy is not the old busy."

-- Anonymous

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"The press can't tell people what to think, but they can certainly tell people what to think about."

-- Anonymous

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"Try to explain election and you may lose your mind; but try to explain it away and you will lose your soul."

-- Anonymous

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"You can profit from your mistakes, but that doesn't mean the more mis-takes, the more profit."

-- Anonymous

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"There is something mysterious in this….  O hidden strength – a man hangs on a cross and lifts the load of eternal death from the human race; a man nailed to wood looses the bonds of ever-lasting death that hold fast the world.  O hidden power – a man condemned with thieves saves men condemned with devils, a man stretched out on the gibbet draws all men to himself. O mysterious strength – one soul coming forth from torment draws countless souls with him out of hell, a man submits to the death of the body and destroys the death of souls…. See, Christian soul, here is the strength of your salvation, here is the cause of your freedom, here is the price of your redemption.  You were a bond-slave and by this man you are free.  By him you are brought back from exile, lost, you are restored, dead, you are raised."

-- Anselm

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"If change or progress is the rule, who is to determine what version of change or progress is good?  And the logical problem here is that once you deny the existence of absolute truth, the definition of 'good' becomes subjective and the only standard of behavior is what we want -- 'we,' in the political sense, meaning the government or bureaucracy.  It reduces politics not to right, but to force.  That is why there is this bullying spirit about our govenment today, and why so many Americans are worried."

-- Larry P. Arnn

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"And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe."

-- Isaac Asimov

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"All that are called philosophers are not lovers of the true wisdom.  True wisdom is the love of God.  Now if God be wisdom, as truth and the Scriptures testify, then a true philosopher is a lover of God."

"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."

"Let man blush to be proud, seeing that God hath humbled Himself."

"One loving heart sets another on fire."

-- Augustine

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"Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get?  Boney fingers."

-- Hoyt Axton

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"Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished."

-- Francis Bacon

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"Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying."

-- R. Scott Bakker

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"It is evident, then, that the pretribulation rapture doctrine has achieved a status and a mystique among many Christians and Christian groups today which seem to be entirely out of proportion to its relative significance in Christian theology as a whole."
                                      
-- William Everett Bell, Jr.

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"When the dream dies, what of the dream?"

-- A. Bertram Chandler

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"There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is curiosity.  There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is vanity.  There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is love."

"If this cold spiritual laxness once penetrates the soul when (as so often happens) the soul is neglectful and the spirit asleep, and if no one (God forbid) is there to curb it, then it reaches into the soul’s interior.  It descends to the depths of the heart and the recesses of the mind, paralyzes the affections, obstructs the paths of counsel, unsteadies the light of judgment, fetters the spirit’s freedom.  And soon—as appears in bodies sick with fever—a rigor of mind takes over: vigor of slackness, energies grow languid, repugnance for austerity increases, fear of poverty disquiets.  The soul shrivels; grace is withdrawn.  Time means boredom, reason is lulled to sleep, the spirit is quenched, the fresh fervor wanes, a fastidious lukewarmness weighs down, brotherly love grows cold, pleasure attracts, security entraps, old habits return."

-- Bernard of Clairvaux

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"Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog's face he gets mad at you?  But when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window."

-- Steve Bluestone

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"It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between grace and karma."

-- Bono

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"Whoever be the instruments of any good to us, of whatever sort, we must look above them, and eye the hand and counsel of God in it, which is the first spring, and be duly thankful to God for it. And whatever evil of crosses or afflictions befalls us, we must look above the instruments of it to God."

-- Thomas Boston

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"We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares.  We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties."

-- Anna C. Brackett

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"I'd rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than riding with Ted Kennedy."

-- Bumper Sticker

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"The function of the expert is not to be more right than others, but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons."

-- David Butler

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"Thus, bound with the fetters of an earthly body, however much we are shadowed on every side with great darkness, we are nevertheless illumined as much as need be for firm assurance when, to show forth his mercy, the light of God sheds even a little of its radiance."

-- John Calvin

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"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."

-- Albert Camus

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"When I am gone, say nothing about Dr. Carey; speak about Dr. Carey's Saviour."

-- William Carey

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"Dogs are not our whole lives, but they make our lives whole."

-- Roger Carras

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"Indeed, this love of the Father for the Son is what makes sense of John 3:16.  True, 'God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son' -- there the object of God's love is the world.  But the standard that tells us just how great that love is has already been set.  What is its measure?  God so loved the world that he gave his Son.  Paul's reasoning is similar: If God did not spare his Son, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things (Rom. 8:32)?  The argument is cogent only because the relationship between the Father and the Son is the standard for all other love relationships."

-- D. A. Carson

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Peter Lorre: "You despise me, don't you?"

Humphrey Bogart: "Well, if I gave it any thought, I would."

-- Casablanca, 1942

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"Conquering kings their titles take

From the foes they capture make;

Jesu, by a noble deed,

From the thousands He hath freed."

-- John Chandler

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"An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another.... You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays."

"Journalism consists in saying 'Lord Jones is dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."

-- G. K. Chesterton

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“It is never too late to put up a fight for freedom.  Right now, even in America, the prospect for starting such a fight is unpromising.  Not that the goal is unattainable, but that interest in freedom is at so low an ebb.  The great enthusiasm of the times is ‘security’; everybody seems bent on catching this evasive will o’ the wisp, oblivious of the fact that it is beyond reach because it does not exist.  There is no such thing as ‘security’; it is a mirage sprouting out of deep-rooted human yearning for something-for-nothing.  Government, which lives and thrives on power, fosters belief in the ‘golden calf,’ so that it can surreptitiously rob the self-mesmerized worshippers of their wealth and their dignity.  It requires no great acumen to realize that what trickles out of the government’s cornucopia must be replaced by labor.  But reflection is foreclosed by the madness that has come over us.  The national passion is for handouts, no matter what the cost.  Freedom, which puts a premium on self-reliance, is in short demand.”

-- Frank Chodorov

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"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." 

"Speeches at conventions compress the largest possible amount of words into the smallest amount of thought."

-- Winston Churchill

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"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

-- Cicero, 55 B.C.

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"Truth describes the statements that accurately reflect objective states of affairs.  Truth is not subject to correction or reproof, but knowledge describes some person’s grasp of the truth.  That a statement is true says nothing about whether any human being knows it.  God grants us truth exhaustively.  Truth and God's knowledge are coextensive, but most truth is not humanly known.  What is humanly known is known to Him perfectly.  Christians err when they think that the absoluteness of truth entails the absoluteness of human knowledge.  Similarly relativists err when they think that the relativity of human knowledge implies the relativity of truth.  While truth is absolute, the human grasp and knowledge of it is relative."

-- David Clark

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"The artist tells the audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts."

-- Robin Collingwood

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“The truly unfathomable degree of complexity found at all levels of universal reality also seems to be explicable only in terms of an all-knowing Intelligence. It just doesn’t seem to be possible for a mindless product of chance to consistently produce instances of complexity that completely overwhelm our ability to understand them. It would thus seem that the origin of any complex process requires at least as much intelligence as it takes for that process to be understood by other intelligent beings. As long as we assume this to be true, it follows that the universe had to have been created by a universal power that is infinitely more advanced than we are at the present time, since the underlying details of the physical universe appear to be infinitely complex. The only being who is capable of such infinitely advanced creative tasks is God by definition.”

-- M. A. Corey

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"A 'pro-choice' position on any issue necessarily includes everyone making their own choices in life.  A pro-choice position on abortion necessarily excludes the aborted, who would otherwise have gone on to make their own choices in life.

Therefore, the so-called pro-choice position on abortion is incoherent and immoral because it allows for only a select few, namely, those not the victims of abortion, to make their own choices in life while automatically excluding innocent victims of abortion with no voice in the matter.

And therefore, the 'pro-life' position is the actual, real pro-choice position on abortion because the anti-abortion position, by choosing life, is the only one that allows for everyone to make their own choices in life without taking away the present or future choices of others."

-- Dave Couric

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"Only when men have nothing to hide from themselves and from their counterparts in the discussion will the way be opened for a dialogue that seeks to convince rather than to repel."

-- Herman Dooyeweerd

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"For did not Arius first, Socinus now

The Son's eternal Godhead disavow?

And did not these by Gospel texts alone

Condemn our doctrine and maintain their own?

Have not all heretics the same pretence,

To plead the Scriptures in their own defence?"

-- John Dryden

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“While reason may not play the primary role in coming to faith, it does play an important role.  If it is not a sufficient cause for faith, it is a necessary condition for it.  While it may be true that no one was ever argued into the kingdom of God, it is also true that no one becomes a Christian without some reason."

-- William Dyrness

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"I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets."

-- Dave Edison

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"Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected."                               

"It is no security to a natural man, that he is now in health, and that he does not see which way he should now immediately go out of the world by any accident, and that there is no visible danger in any respect in his circumstances.  The manifold and continual experience of the world in all ages, shows this is no evidence, that a man is not on the very brink of eternity, and that the next step will not be into another world.  The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable.  Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen.  The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day; the sharpest sight cannot discern them."

-- Jonathan Edwards

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"With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate.  After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past."

-- Loren Eiseley

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"Possessions possess."

-- Paul Eldridge

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"A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic."

-- George Eliot

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"The last temptation is the greatest treason; to do the right deed for the wrong reason."

-- T. S. Eliot

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"He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

"Missionaries are very human folks, just doing what they are asked.  Simply a bunch of nobodies trying to exalt Somebody."

-- Jim Elliot

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"The secret of genius is . . . first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"God has a history of using the insignificant to accomplish the impossible."

-- Richard Exley

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“People who are unfulfilled after pursuing things that do not satisfy may be astonished to see Christians who are joyful after depriving themselves for the sake of the gospel.”

-- Ajith Fernando

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"Once truth has been devoured, people swallow falsehoods whole.  Without confidence in the concept of truth, listeners are disarmed against lies."

-- Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

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"If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene -- if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage -- if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount.  And it would suffer immeasurably through comparison.  For nearly two thousand years the Christian world has been holding in its hands the complete answer to its restless and fruitless yearning."

-- J. T. Fisher

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"He's a fool that is not melancholy once a day."

-- Thomas Fuller

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"Now, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress.  If that Body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.  If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. . . . If the next centennial does not find us a great nation . . . it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."

-- James A. Garfield, 20th President & gospel minister during the 2nd Great Awakening

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"While Darwinian Man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved!"

-- W. S. Gilbert

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"If it weren't for electricity, we'd all be watching television by candlelight."

-- George Gobel

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"For man must strive, and striving he must err."

-- Goethe

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"The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

-- Stephen Jay Gould

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"He prays, but He hears prayer. He weeps, but He causes tears to cease. He is bruised and wounded, but He heals every disease and every infirmity. He is lifted up and nailed to the Tree, but by the Tree of Life He restores us, yes, He saved even the robber crucified with Him. He dies, but He gives life, and by His death destroys death. He is buried, but He rises again; He goes down to Hell, but He brings up the souls; He ascends to heaven, and shall come again to judge the living and the dead."

-- Gregory of Nazianzus

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"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."

-- Vaclev Havel

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"At the heart of the election doctrine throbs God's freedom.  God is not bound by any necessity of nature to the universe, to mankind or even to the church.  He is free to create if and as he wills, free to provide or not to provide salvation for fallen creatures, free to covenant or not to covenant with the Hebrews or any other peoples or with no one at all.  He is free also, if he wills, to graft Gentiles into the plan of redemption, to call out a penitent church for global witness concerning his ready forgiveness in Christ, and even to consummate history by final judgment on all men and nations."

-- Carl F. H. Henry

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"You can never get enough of what you don't really want."

-- Eric Hoffer

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"Today’s world is ravaged by dehumanizing barbarism and torn by ideological conflict.  Its barbarisms are outrageous violence, a terrifying nuclear standoff, extremes of poverty, wanton abuse of natural resources, and the usurpation of political power for sectarian ends.  Our ideologies are partly to blame.  They come from both East and West, but the dominant tradition is a secular naturalistic humanism that approaches human existence without the theistic basis for human values on which Western culture was built.  Art and science have indeed made tremendous strides, giving us new art forms and new thought forms, with new concepts and theories and technologies to match.  But they, too, are penetrated by the ideologies of the day whose values and presuppositions permeate society, shape the spirit of our times, and affect both thought and action….

Christianity has vitally important implications for every area of life and thought, implications that need to be developed; both to live and think Christianly in today’s world, with meaning and hope, does not come easily. It means ferreting out the influence of non-Christian assumptions and bringing distinctively Christian presuppositions to bear in their place.  To identity and articulate these distinctives systematically in relation to the world of ideas is to develop a Christian world-view.  Moreover, I am convinced that the most persuasive case for Christianity lies in the overall coherence and human relevance of its worldview."

-- Arthur Holmes

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"Let the holiest and best thing that we do be considered: we are never better affected unto God than when we pray; yet when we pray how are our affections many times distracted! How little reverence do we show to the grand majesty of that God unto whom we speak!  How little remorse of our own miseries!  How little taste of the sweet influence of his tender mercy do we feel!  Are we not as unwilling many times to begin, and as glad to make an end, as if God in saying 'Call upon me' had set us a very burdensome task?"

-- Richard Hooker

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"Nothing is an unmixed blessing."

-- Horace

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"If the tendency of evangelicalism is to ignore the treasures in the various rooms by supposing that the hallway is the house, my own tendency is to ignore the hallway where my brothers and sisters mingle and enrich my own understanding of the faith we share in common. At seminal points my own growth in appreciation for Christianity generally, as well as Reformed convictions, has been spurred on by lively interaction with believers from other traditions. In many cases, I have not only become more aware of where our differences lie but of where my own caricatures or half-truths about other views lie. In the process, I am often amazed by areas of agreement I never knew existed because we use different vocabularies. Each tradition has a tendency to ride hobby-horses that obscure other important truths, and by engaging with other Christians we often find ourselves recovering emphases that were latent in our tradition but that we have ignored because we were content to talk to ourselves. The “one holy, catholic and apostolic church” is a body, with ears as well as mouths. Mutual edification and correction can occur not only formally, within our own churches, but informally through interaction. Listening in the hallway not only includes other Christians but the strangers who do not yet embrace our common faith. If we stay holed up in our rooms all the time, we are faithful neither to our evangelistic calling in the world nor to our own spiritual health. Ignorant of the pressing questions our neighbors are asking and objections they articulate, we become self-satisfied and our churches spend their energies on introspection, which easily turns to family quarrels of secondary or tertiary matters. Spending some time in the hallway has a way of waking the sleep from our eyes."

-- Michael Horton

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"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

-- Victor Hugo

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"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

-- William James

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"A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."

-- Thomas Jefferson

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"To know and to serve God, of course, is why we're here, a clear truth that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easly discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard.  But a little faith will see you through.  What else will do except faith in such a cynical, corrupt time?  When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word."

-- Garrison Keillor

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“The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued and that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time.”

-- Timothy Keller

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Is there an unwritten rule that every place of employment must have at least one person with absolutely no bathroom etiquette?

-- Lucas Knisely

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"A man with God is always in the majority."

-- John Knox

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"Some people are unpleasant though worthy, others pleasant despite their faults."

-- La Rochefoucauld

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"By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn."

-- Latin Proverb

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"Advertising: The science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

-- Stephen Leacock

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"As God calculates, so the world is made."

-- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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"The moralities accepted among men may differ--though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed--but they all agree in prescribing a behavior which their adherents fail to practice.  All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own."

"What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.  You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round.  Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism.  But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us.  It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assump-tions in all the other books.  In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him.  But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular intro-duction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.  The first step to the reconversion of the country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguins and the Thinker's Library on their own ground.  Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest."

"The fitness of the Christian miracles, and their difference from these mythological miracles, lies in the fact that they show invasion by a Power which is not alien.  They are what might be expected to happen when [nature] is invaded not simply by a god, but by the God of Nature: by a Power which is outside her jurisdiction not as a foreigner but as a sovereign."

-- C. S. Lewis

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"In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything.  With it, nothing can fail; against  it, nothing can succeed.  Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions."

Senator Horace Maynard: "Beware, Mr. President, and do not go too fast.  There is danger ahead."  Abraham Lincoln (good-naturedly): "I know that, but I shall go just so fast and only so fast as I think I'm right and the people are ready for the step."

-- Abraham Lincoln

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"To do so no more is the truest repentance."

"No man can make a theologian, no emperor or pope; only the Holy Spirit can do so. "

-- Martin Luther

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"A high view of orthodoxy cannot nullify or undermine the importance of orthopraxy.  That might seem to be the case if you start with the presupposition that certainty and strong convictions are always wrong and arguments about the truth value of propositions are always arrogant....  Biblical orthodoxy encompasses orthopraxy.  Both right doctrine and right living are absolutely essential and totally inseparable for the true child of God.  That is the consistent teaching of Christ Himself....  Furthermore, Scripture does clearly and consistently teach the primacy of right belief as the foundation of right behavior.  In other words, righteous living is properly seen as a fruit of authentic faith, and never the other way around.  Pious actions devoid of any real love for the truth do not even constitute genuine orthopraxy by any measure.  On the contrary, that is the worst kind of self-righteousness and hypocrisy.  So truth is worth fighting over....  It is the one thing in this world the church is supposed to fight for.  Lose that fight and all else is lost."

-- John MacArthur

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"I think we ought to hold not only that man has a soul, but that it is important that he should know that he has a soul."

"...the removal of intellectual objections will [not] make a man a Christian.  No conversion was ever wrought simply by argument.  A change of heart is also necessary.  And that can be wrought only by the immediate exercise of the power of God.  But because intellectual labour is insufficient it does not follow, as is so often assumed, that it is unnecessary.  God may, it is true, overcome all intellectual obstacles by an immediate exercise of His regenerative power.  Sometimes He does.  But He does so very seldom.  Usually He exerts His power in connection with certain conditions of the human mind.  Usually He does not bring into the Kingdom, entirely without preparation, those whose mind and fancy are completely dominated by ideas which make the acceptance of the gospel logically impossible."

"When any new fact enters the human mind it must proceed to make itself at home; it must proceed to introduce itself to the previous denizens of the house. That process of introduction of new facts is called thinking. And, contrary to what seems to be quite generally supposed, thinking cannot be avoided by the Christian man."

-- J. Gresham Machen

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"Politics is civil war carried on by other means."

-- Alasdair MacIntyre

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"We are not to seek nor to expect justification by the deeds of the law; no, verily – that comes to us by the perfect righteousness of Christ.  But shall we therefore encroach upon the strict claims of the law as our rule of life, as the guide and teacher of our inner man?  Our want of conformity to its demands does not diminish its claims.  Our attainments are one thing, our duty is another.  The former are crowded with defects, and call for daily sorrow and for daily pardon; the latter calls for nothing less than a hearty and full compliance with all that God commands.  A standard less elevated than this will leave us without chart or compass, throw every man upon his own dark, selfish, and capricious promptings, and by pulling down the views from the right mark, paralyze our efforts, reconcile us to dwarfish attainments, and at length fill the bosom with proud and swelling notions for having attained to a deceitful and imaginary perfection.  What unscriptural reasonings sometimes creep into the hearts of many that we would fain call the Children of God?… Alas!  Alas!  These frames and feelings are often poor, rebellious, anti-nomian things!…  Away with all this carnal heresy!  God’s eternal word is the standard.  As the creatures of God we are bound to respect it in all things; as redeemed by the blood of Christ, our obligations are infinitely augmented with respect to all God’s commands. "

-- C. D. Mallary

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"Oh how successfully would the work of God go on, if we would but all join together in our several places to promote it."

-- Thomas Manton

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"The Spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions, and the nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become."

-- Henry Martyn

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"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

-- John Milton

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“As humans, we live and ought to live our lives not merely by truth but by knowledge of truth.  Knowledge of truth gives us confident trust and access to reality.  Moreover, as those called to be teachers and scholars for the church and, indeed, for the unbelieving world, we are called not only to impart and defend truth, but to impart and defend knowledge of truth.  This entails that we must impart and defend the notion that we do, in fact, have knowledge of important spiritual and ethical truths.  Among other things, this gives confidence in truth and knowledge to those we serve.  Thus, we are irresponsible not simply if we fail to achieve knowledge of reality; we are doubly irresponsible if we fail to impart to others knowledge as knowledge.  The corro-sive effects of postmodernism eat away at the fulfillment of these duties and responsibilities that constitute our calling from Almighty God….

Faced with such opposition and the pressure it brings, postmodernism is a form of intellectual pacifism that, at the end of the day, recommends backgammon while the barbarians are at the gate.  It is the easy, cowardly way out that removes the pressure to engage alternative conceptual schemes, to be different, to risk ridicule, to take a stand outside the gate.  But it is precisely as disciples of Christ, even more, as officers in his army, that the pacifist way out is simply not an option.  However comforting it may be, postmodernism is the cure that kills the patient, the military strategy that concedes defeat before the first shot is fired, the ideology that undermines its own claims to allegiance.  And it is an immoral, coward’s way out that is not worthy of a movement born out of the martyrs’ blood.”

-- J. P. Moreland

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"The fundamental rule of the Age of Celebrity: 'It doesn't matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are.' "

-- Lance Morrow

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". . . if we appreciate the implications of total depravity, then we are faced with a series of very insistent questions.  How is it that men who still lie under the wrath and curse of God and are heirs of hell enjoy so many good gifts at the hand of God?  How is it that men who are not savingly renewed by the Spirit of God nevertheless exhibit so many qualities, gifts and accomplishments that promote the preservation, temporal happiness, cultural progress, social and economic improvement of themselves and of others?  How is it that races and peoples that have been apparently untouched by the redemptive and regenerative influences of the gospel contribute so much to what we call human civilization?  To put the question most compre-hensively: how is it that this sin-cursed world enjoys so much favor and kindness at the hand of its holy and ever-blessed Creator?"

-- John Murray

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"A society in which any kind of nonsense is acceptable is not a free society.  An ag-nostic pluralism has no defense against nonsense."

-- Lesslie Newbigin

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"Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future genera-tions into a single, unalterable course...."

-- Barack Obama

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"Conviction without experience makes for harshness."

"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

"I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it."

"It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes."

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

-- Flannery O'Connor

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"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful... and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."    

"We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

-- George Orwell

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"When all deserve to be rejected by the God who in love moves to reconcile them to himself and renew them in his own moral image, thus preparing them for a destiny of delight with himself, we are out of the realm of both fairness and unfairness. Grace trumps each of them. When the great good given is not only undeserved but contrary to our deservings, we should humbly receive it and give thanks for it, not stand back and complain that in this or that respect it ought to be greater than it is. There is no warrant whatever for the 'ought to be' in such complaints."

"God’s act of election was defined by the Arminians as a resolve to receive to sonship and glory a duly qualified class of people – believers in Christ (plus any others who, though they had not heard the gospel, lived up to the light they had – though this point need not concern us here).  This becomes a resolve to receive individual persons only in virtue of God’s foreseeing the contingent fact that they will of their own accord believe.  There is nothing in the decree of election to ensure that the class of believers will ever have any members; God does not determine to make any man believe.  But Calvinists define election as a choice of particular undeserving persons to be saved from sin and brought to glory, and to that end to be redeemed by the death of Christ and given faith by the Spirit’s effectual calling.  Where the Arminian says: 'I owe my election to my faith,' the Calvinist says: 'I owe my faith to my election.'  Clearly these two concepts of election are very far apart.

Christ’s work of redemption was defined by the Arminians as the removing of an obstacle (the unsatisfied claims of justice) which stood in the way of God’s offering pardon to sinners, as He desired to do, on condition that they believe.  Redemption, according to Arminianism, secured for God a right to make this offer, but did not of itself ensure that anyone would ever accept it; for faith, being a work of man’s own, is not a gift that comes to him from Calvary.  Christ’s death created an opportunity for the exercise of saving faith, but that is all it did.  Calvinists, however, define redemption as Christ’s actual substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners, through which God was reconciled to them, their liability to punishment was forever destroyed, and a title to eternal life was secured for them.  In consequence of this, they now have in God’s sight a right to the gift of faith, as the means of entry into the enjoyment of their inheritance.  Calvary, in other words, not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom Christ did; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their salvation made actual.  The Cross saves.  Where the Arminian will only say: 'I could not have gained my salvation without Calvary,' the Calvinist will say: 'Christ gained my salvation for me at Calvary.'  The former makes the Cross the sine qua non of salvation; the latter sees it as the actual procuring cause of salvation, and traces the source of every spiritual blessing, faith included, back to the great transaction between God and His Son carried through on Calvary’s hill.  Clearly, these two concepts of redemption are quite at variance."

-- J. I. Packer

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"I would give worlds, if I had them, that Age of Reason had not been published.  O, Lord, help me!  Christ, help me!  O God what have I done to suffer so much?  But there is no God!  But if there should be, what will become of me hereafter?  Stay with me for God's sake!  Send even a child to stay with me, for it is hell to be alone.  If ever the devil had an agent, I have been that one."

-- Thomas Paine

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"Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves. "

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

"Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed."

"Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."

"We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others."

-- Blaise Pascal

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"To mend the world is true religion."

-- William Penn

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"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?" 

-- Laurence J. Peter

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"Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church.  Worship is.  Missions exists because worship doesn't.  Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ulitmate, not man.  When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more.  It is a temporary necessity.  But worship abides forever.

Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal in missions.  It's the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God's glory.  The goal of missions is the gladness of the peoples in the greatness of God."

-- John Piper

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"The prophet is God’s detective seeking for a lost treasure.  The degree of his effectiveness is determined by his measure of unpopularity.  Compromise is not known to him. 

He has no price tags.  He is totally 'otherworldly.'  He is unquestionably controversial and unpardonably hostile.  He marches to another drummer!  He breathes the rarefied air of inspiration.  He is a 'seer' who comes to lead the blind.  He lives in the heights of God and comes into the valley with a 'Thus saith the Lord.'

He shares some of the foreknowledge of God and so is aware of impending judgment.  He lives in 'splendid isolation.'  He is the forthright and outright, but he claims no birthright.  His message is 'Repent, be reconciled to God or else…!'

His prophecies are parried.  His truth brings torment, but his voice is never void.

He is the villain of today and the hero of tomorrow.  He is excommunicated while alive and exalted while dead!  He is dishonored with epithets when breathing and honored with epitaphs when dead.  He is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, but few will “make the grade” in his class.

He is friendless while living and famous when dead.  He is against the establishment in ministry; then he is established as a saint by posterity.  He eats daily the bread of affliction while he ministers, but he feeds the Bread of Life to those who listen.

He walks before men for days, but has walked before God for years.  He is a scourge to the nation before he is scourged by the nation.  He announces, pronounces, and denounces!  He has a heart like a volcano and his words are as fire.

He talks to men about God.  He carries the lamp of truth amongst heretics while he is lampooned by men.  He faces God before he faces men, but he is self-effacing.  He hides with God in the secret place, but he has nothing to hide in the marketplace.

He is naturally sensitive but supernaturally spiritual. He has passion, purity, and pugnacity.  He is ordained of God but disdained by men."

-- Leonard Ravenhill

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"Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it.  If it keeps moving, regulate it.  And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."

"Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong."

"Politics is not a bad profession.  If you succeed, there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book."

"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under."

-- Ronald Reagan

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"If God only required what people could do for themselves, then all that He does for them in Christ would be unnecessary.  Inasmuch as the commandments are beyond our ability, they show the fullness and suitableness of the promises of the gospel.  God did not give the commandments to man after the Fall with expectation that we had the ability to keep them.  Rather, they were given to convict us of our helplessness and inability to keep them, and thereby to cause us to cast ourselves on God's mercy and seek His grace and forgiveness."

-- Ernie Reisinger

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"The theorist who maintains that science is the be-all and end-all--that what is not in science textbooks is not worth knowing--is an ideologist with a peculiar and distorted doctrine of his own.  For him, science is no longer a sector of the cognitive enterprise but an all-inclusive worldview.  This is the doctrine not of science but of scientism.  To take this stance is not to cele-brate science but to distort it."

-- Nicholas Rescher

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"Emancipated from an ethic of hard work, Americans have also grown morally less self-demanding.  They have been released from the old system of self-demands by a convergence of doctrines that do not resort to new restrictions but rather propose jointly the superiority of all that money can buy, technology can make, and science can conceive."

-- Philip Rieff

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"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

-- Adrian Rogers

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"Often we trust specialized experts who trust other specialized experts, all of whom have formulated their 'worldview' on prevailing opinions without having had a chance to evaluate the larger picture."

-- Ariel Roth

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"We must learn to believe promises better than possessions, things unseen better than things seen, things in heaven out of sight better than things on earth before our eyes, the praise of the invisible God better than the praise of visible man.  Then, and then only, will we prefer God to the world."

-- J. C. Ryle

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"It is the dogma that is the drama--not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to lovingkindness and moral uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death--but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death.  Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that one might be glad to believe."

-- Dorothy Sayers

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"Tell me what you celebrate, and I will tell you who you are."

-- Alexander Schmemann

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"The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him.  So don't."

-- Roger Scruton

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"Man is a contemptible thing unless he rises above his human concerns."

-- Seneca the Younger

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind. "

-- Dr. Seuss

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"It is a wise father that knows his own child."

"While others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity."

-- William Shakespeare

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"Those that live most devoutly for the world to come are often in the best position to change the present."

-- Bruce L. Shelley

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"Under capitalism, man exploits man.  Under communism, it's just the reverse."

-- Soviet-era saying

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"We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.... We must have passion--indeed hearts on fire for the things of God.  But that passion must resist with intensity the anti-intellectual spirit of the world."

-- R. C. Sproul

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"If an act of sin would increase my usefulness tenfold, I have no right to do it; and if an act of righteousness would appear like to destroy all my apparent usefulness, I am yet to do it.  It is yours and mine to do the right though the heavens fall, and follow the command of Christ whatever the consequences may be. "

"Be slow to leave your calling until you have plain indications from providence that you ought to do so, for many a man in moving from his place has been as a bird that has wandered from its nest. Bow your soul to His sovereign will. God appoints our position infinitely better than we could appoint it, even if we could have the choosing of it."

-- C. H. Spurgeon

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"A liberal will hang you from a lower branch."

-- Adlai E. Stevenson

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"As often as we are mown down by you, the more we grow in numbers; the blood of Christians is the seed."

-- Tertullian

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"What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner, 'I stand for consensus!'?"

-- Margaret Thatcher

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"Truth has nothing to fear under investigation."

-- Aldon Thompson

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“The ultimate goal of gene family studies is an understanding of how duplicated genes have taken on novel biochemical and organismal functions. Domain shuffling aside, it remains a mystery how the undirected process of mutation, combined with natural selection, has resulted in the creation of thousands of new proteins with extraordinarily diverse and well-optimized functions. This problem is particularly acute for tightly integrated molecular systems that consist of many interacting parts, such as ligands, receptors, and the downstream regulatory factors with which they interact. In these systems, it is not clear how a new function for any protein might be selected for unless the other members of the complex are already present, creating a molecular version of the ancient evolutionary riddle of the chicken and the egg.”

-- Joseph W. Thornton & Rob DeSalle

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"The will to win is not most important; it is the will to prepare to win."

-- William Tisdale

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"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the great-est complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

-- Leo Tolstoy

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"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. . . .  For this reason the gravest question before the church is always God himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his heart conceives God to be like. . . .  Before the Christian church goes into eclipse anywhere there must be a corrupting of her simple basic theology.  She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, "What is God like?" and goes on from there."

"God does not sell himself into the hands of religious magicians.  I do not believe in that kind of miracles.  I believe in the kind of miracles that God gives to his people who live so close to him that answers to prayer are common and these miracles are not uncommon."

"God is pleased with His people when His praise is continually and joyfully on their lips.  The heavenly scene John describes is the unceasing cry of the adoring living creatures, 'Holy, holy, holy!' They rest not, day or night.  My fear is that too many of God's professing people down here are resting far too often between their efforts at praise."

-- A. W. Tozer

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"The media can create the false appearance of charisma in the absence of the genuine wider scale adulation which would make it a reality.  They can fabricate a pseudo-personality cult."

-- Robert C. Tucker

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"The most miraculous thing is happening. . . .  The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening.  God is showing through.  They hate it, but they can't do anything about it.  Facts are facts."

-- John Updike

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"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

-- Nick Vujicic

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"Jesus Christ was more willing to go to the cross than we are to the throne of grace."

-- Thomas Watson

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"Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth."

-- Bill Watterson

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"The issue today... is no different in principle from what it was in the sixteenth century.  The Protestant Reformers insisted that the Word of God must be free to speak unhampered by tradition or by the limitations of experience.  In the case of the Roman Church, tradition had come to exercise a restraining role on biblical revelation; it was, Luther asserted, gagging Scripture.  By the same token, some Anabaptists allowed Scripture (the externum Verbum) to be authoritative in practice only insofar as its teaching was authenticated by inner experience (the internum Verbum).  The Reformers countered that both the church and our experience must alike be subject to Scripture, for it is through our willingness to hear the Word of God that we exercise our accountability before the God of the Word.

In a fallen world, authorities in competition with God and his Christ and his Word are precisely what one would expect to find.  What one would not expect to find is these pseudo authorities being given aid and comfort within the structures of evangelical theology, but that is precisely what we have today.  It underscores the contention of the Reformers, however, that reformation should not be seen merely as a past event but should always be a contemporary experience.  In every generation the Word of God must be heard afresh and obeyed afresh if the God of that Word is to be accorded our obedience in the places where it really counts.

-- David F. Wells  

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"Ought not a Minister to have, first, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness?"

-- John Wesley

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"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record.  By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

-- Ronald R. West

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"Discipline without direction is drudgery."

-- Donald Whitney

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"We do not intend to deride any good thing, and we're thankful for what-ever truly helps human beings in their desperate life upon the earth. Nothing else would be compatable with the spirit of Jesus."

-- Dallas Willard

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"Risks are not to be evaluated in terms of the probability of success but in terms of the value of the goal."

-- Ralph Winter

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Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.

-- Ben Witherington

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