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 | Oscar Aria: "It is essential that justice be done, and it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different." | ||||||||||
| Charles Darwin: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." | ||||||||||
| Tommy Douglas: "I never thought that a man could save his soul if his belly was empty; or that he could think about things like beauty of goodness, if he had a toothache." | ||||||||||
| Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
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| Pope Paul VI: "If you want peace, you must work for justice." | ||||||||||
| Lucy Stone: "To make the public sentiment on the side of all that is just and true and noble is the highest use of life." (1852). | ||||||||||
| Tolstoy: "When will justice come? When those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are." | ||||||||||
| Elie Wiesel: "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." |
Knowledge:
| Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626 CE): "The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other." | ||||
| Albert Einstein:
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| Anais Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." | ||||
| Dana Scully, character on the TV program "X-files": "There is no contradiction in Nature - only contradiction in what we know of it." | ||||
| Alvin Toffler: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." | ||||
| Chuang Tzu, circa 300 BCE: "To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge." |
Leadership:
| Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition: "This century has given us giants and moral leaders, like Churchill and Roosevelt, Gandhi and de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King" (Quoted by The Internal Light, issue 3, a publication of The Interfaith Alliance, from a speech given by Mr. Reed to the National Press Club in 1996-OCT.) |
| Edmund Burke: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." (Quoted in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent, Vol. i. Page 526.) |
| William Sloane Coffin: senior minister, Riverside Church, NYC: "The sense of fulfillment which comes with being in the right fight is a very wonderful thing." 3 |
Learning:
| C.G. Jung: "It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing." |
| Confucius: "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." |
Liberty:
| Vicktor Frankl: "The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." |
| Patrick Henry: "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" (Part of a speech delivered to the Virginia Convention, 1775-MAR) |
| Patrick Henry: "He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. |
| Friedrich von Hayek: "Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable." (From "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960)) |
| Daniel Webster: "God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. |
Lies:
| Adolf Hitler: "The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." |
| Otto Von Bismarck (1815-1898): "People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election." |
| DAlfred McLung Lee & Elizabeth Bryant Lee: "Science flourishes on criticism. Dangerous propaganda crumbles before it." From "The Fine Art of Propaganda" (1939) |
| George Orwell: "The way to get a lie believed is to continue to REPEAT it". |
| Nicol Williamson playing the role of Merlin in the movie "Excalibur": "When a man lies, he murders part of the world" |
Life:
| Anon: "The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." |
| Marcus Aurelius: "..and you will give yourself relief if you perform every act of your life as if it were the last." |
| Gillian Graham: "If you live your life out of memory, you live out of your history. That's what once was. If you live out of your imagination, you live out of your potential. That's what can be." |
| Winston Groom: "Life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you're gonna get." From the movie Forrest Gump. |
| Kierkegaard (1813-1855): "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." |
| A.S. Neill: "The function of the child is to live his own life –- not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best." |
| Jean-Paul Sartre: "It is up to you to give [life] a meaning." |
| Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." |
| Elton Trueblood: "A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit." |
Love:
| Anon: "Amor gignit amorem" translated as: "Love begats love." | ||||
| Anon: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." Spotted on a bumper sticker in Syracuse NY. | ||||
| Anon: "Whenever a person begins to love their ideology more than they love people, things get ugly." | ||||
| St. Augustine: "Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum" Translated as: "With love for mankind and hatred of sins." It is often loosely translated as: "Love the sinner and hate the sin," a saying often incorrectly attributed to Jesus. 1,2 | ||||
| Joan Crawford: "Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell." | ||||
| Frances David: "In order to love alike, we need not think alike." | ||||
| Erich Fromm: "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you"." | ||||
| Robert Funk: "Love your enemies is probably the most radical thing Jesus ever said. Unless, of course, one considers the parable of the Samaritan. There the admonition is to let your enemies love you." From his book "The Once and future Jesus." | ||||
| Vincent Van Gogh: "Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well." | ||||
| Heinrich Hein: "I care little in the existence of a heaven or hell; self respect does not allow me to guide my acts with an eye toward heavenly salvation or hellish punishment. I pursue the good in life because it is beautiful and attracts me; and shun the bad because it is ugly and repulsive. All our acts should originate from the spring of unselfish love, whether there be a continuation after death or not." | ||||
| L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and the Church of Scientology: "Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To love is the road to strength. To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe." | ||||
| Kahlil Gibran: "Love one another, but make not a bond of that love. Let it rather be like a moving sea between the shores of your souls. And stand together, and yet not too near together. For even the pillars of the temple must stand apart; and the oak tree and the cypress will not grow in each other’s shadow. Remember that love gives nothing but from itself. Love possesses not, nor would it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love. And think not that you can direct the course of love. For love, if it finds you worthy, will direct your course." | ||||
| St. Paul: Paraphrase of the Christian scriptures: 1
Corinthians 13:1-8: "If
I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm
nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with
power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day,
and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I
don't love, I'm nothing." "If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love." "Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head, Doesn't force itself on others, Isn't always, 'me first,' Doesn't fly off the handle, Doesn't keep score of the sins of others, Doesn't revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps on going to the end. Love never dies." From "The Message" translation by Eugene Peterson. | ||||
| Rainer Maria Rilke: "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." | ||||
| Mother Theresa: "We cannot do great things in this world. We can only do small things with great love." | ||||
| Lao Tzu: "To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage." | ||||
| Oscar Wilde: "Who, being loved, is poor?" | ||||
| Marianne Williamson:
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Marriage:
| An Apache Blessing: "Now you will feel no rain, For each of you will be the shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be the warmth to the other. Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you. Go now to your dwelling, to enter into the days of your life together, and may your days be good and long upon the earth." |
| Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 1992-JAN-8: "I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period." |
| Quotations on same-sex marriages |
Media:
| Spike Lee, filmmaker: "As we move toward the millennium, the year 2000, the most powerful nations are not those that have nuclear bombs, but those that control the media. That's where the battle is being fought; that is how you control people's minds." (Part of an address at Fisk University, Nashville, TN, 1996-SEP-4) |
| Dorthy Gilliam: "Newsrooms that do not reflect America's diversity do their readers an injustice. they fail to tell the stories of its citizens, they give readers a distorted image of themselves and they grossly twist the reality of minority groups." The Washington Post, 1997-DEC-20. |
Memories:
| Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens: "It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so!" |
| George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (From "Life of Reason" (1905)) |
Morality:
| Albert Einstein: "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." |
| Ruth Bell Graham (wife of Billy Graham): "If God doesn't judge America for her immorality, he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah." |
| Martin Luther King, Jr: "Why is the church always a taillight rather than a headlight?" |
| Jean-Paul Sartre: "If God is dead, everything is permitted." |
| Ed Stephan "I simply cannot understand the notion that if you're not Christian you can't be moral, let alone that you must be immoral. It's such a juvenile concept you wonder how the speaker could even form the words." 3 |
| Oscar Wilde: "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." |
New religious movements:
| See "Cults." |
References:
- "St. Augustine's Letter 211," translated in J.-P. Migne (ed.) "Patrologiae Latinae" Volume 33, (1845).
- David R.W. Wadsworth, "Love the sinner but not the sin" at: http://www.voy.com/
- Comment posted to CarpetBagger Report about comments by Kathleen Harris. More info.
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Copyright © 1996 to 2008 by Ontario
Consultants on Religious Tolerance.
Copyrights for the individual quotations are normally held by their authors
Last updated: 2008-MAR-03
Compiled by: B.A. Robinson
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