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Christianity Quotes

Jesus has the most entries, then Jefferson, Shakespeare, Augustine and C. S. Lewis. Critics get space too: Bertrand Russell in 1932 says Christianity gives reasons for not fearing death and so fails to teach the virtue of courage, and Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) asks whether a Christ must perish in every age. Disraeli’s Endymion (1880) has the shortest line on the page: his Christianity was muscular.

Gandhi’s “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians” is disputed, and the notes bring in the missionary E. Stanley Jones, who is said to have asked him a similar question. A line about the last stone of the last church, credited to Émile Zola, is traced to a Soviet popular-science book of 1959. The third disputed entry is an anti-Christian remark credited to Hitler.

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Most quoted on christianity:

God's power is infinite, Whatever he wills is executed; But neither man nor any other animal is happy; therefore he does not will their happiness. Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is he both able and willing to prevent evil? Then whence cometh evil?

David Hume Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)

The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are... notorious. ...[T]hey disagreed about the nature of... [Christ's] love.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

The main reason for holding to the historicity of the figure of Jesus ...resides not primarily in historical evidence but derives instead from a modern theological necessity.

Thomas L. Thompson

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

At sea on a ship in a thunderstorm
on the very night the Christ was born
a sailor heard from overhead
a mighty voice cry "Pan is Dead!"
So follow Christ as best you can
Pan is dead — Long live Pan!

Mike Scott Dream Harder (1993)

As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Joel Barlow Treaty of Tripoli (1797)

Sing, my tongue, the Savior's glory,
Of His Flesh the mystery sing;
Of the Blood, all price exceeding,
Shed by our immortal King.

Thomas Aquinas

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.

Saint Peter

'If,' said he, 'the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows, that he had his substance from nothing.'

Arius

Whoever is separated from this Catholic Church, by this single sin of being separated from the unity of Christ, no matter how estimable a life he may imagine he is living, shall not have life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.

Augustine of Hippo

God ... created this Speck of Dirt and the human Species for his glory: and with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our Species miserable forever, for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian Theologians in general: ten to one.

John Adams

Christianity really says only one thing: that the infinite incomprehensibility which we call God exists, that we submit to it unconditionally as our own perfection, and that the acceptance of this submission has received a historical and unconditional guarantee in Jesus.

Karl Rahner

Christianity, in spite of its fundamental originality, was not something essentially new, quite the reverse, but the lawful heir to all the good that had been destroyed by the Roman Empire and for which men had retained an intense longing.

Simone Weil

The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same. (4)

Jesus

We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact!

John Adams

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness.

Immanuel Kant Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793)

The members of Christ, many though they be, are bound to one another by the ties of charity and peace under the one Head, who is our Saviour Himself, and form one man. Often their voice is heard in the Psalms as the voice of one man; the cry of one is as the cry of all, for all are one in One.

Augustine of Hippo

Alan Dundes has shown, the gospel life of Jesus corresponds in most particulars with the worldwide paradigm of the Mythic Hero Archetype as delineated by Lord Raglan, Otto Rank, and others.

Robert M. Price

Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn't even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.

William Lane Craig

The duty of relieving his fellow creature in distress is imposed on the Christian irrespective of religious doctrines and tenets, and notwithstanding that the object of charity may worship God in an erroneous manner, but in that which he believes to be most acceptable to his Creator.

John Romilly, 1st Baron Romilly Att.-Gen. v. Calvert (1857)

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