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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:

The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel.

Gary North Gary North Political Polytheism (1989)

When we say that God is a spirit, we know what we mean, as well as we do when we say that the pyramids of Egypt are matter. Let us be content, therefore, to believe him to be a spirit, that is, an essence that we know nothing of, in which originally and necessarily reside all energy, all power, all capacity, all activity, all wisdom, all goodness.

John Adams

Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going.

Jesus

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty — necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

James Baldwin The Fire Next Time (1963)

In the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over, no "secular," biographical data, so to speak, it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth.

Robert M. Price

The insidious tricks of the enemy may disturb you, but the humility and humanity of Christ should console you. This man emphasizes how high above you Christ has been lifted up; Christ, though, says how low he came down to you.

Augustine of Hippo

Though [Charles Guignebert] could not accept either the Christ myth theory, which held that no historical Jesus existed, or the Dutch Radical denial that Paul authored any of the epistles, Guignebert took both quite seriously.

Robert M. Price

If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic.

Sam Harris

Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.

Rudolf Bultmann New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941)

What would happen if everyone did it? If everyone gave their wealth away what would we do for capital? If everyone loved their enemies who would ward off the Communists? This argument could be met on other levels, but here our only point is to observe that such reasoning would have been preposterous in the early church and remains ludicrous whenever committed Christians accept realistically their minority status. Far more fitting than "What if everybody did it" would be its inverse, "What if nobody else acted like a Christian, but we did?"

John Howard Yoder The Priestly Kingdom (1984)

Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."

Rudyard Kipling

His Christianity was muscular.

Benjamin Disraeli Endymion (1880)

[T]he Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.

Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (1776)

To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity.

Tom Holland Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019)

Indeed, if we decide, with Voltaire, that at least some contemporary advocates of the non-historicity of Jesus are really "more ingenious than learned", taking this question seriously may, at the very least, prove beneficial in raising the standard of debate and the wider understanding — in fact, even self-understanding — of what New Testament scholars do and how they do it.

Justin Meggitt

Christ says, "Forgive all. Forgive not once, not seven times, but forgive without end." "Love your enemies." "Do good to those who hate you." Courts of law do not forgive, but they punish; they do not do good, but evil, to those whom they call the enemies of society. So, the true sense of the doctrine is that Christ forbids all courts of law.

Leo Tolstoy What I Believe (1885)

The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to every house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents.

John Adams

Jesus is nowhere in the Talmud said to have been executed by the Romans; his death is represented as solely the work of the Jews: and nowhere is his alleged Messiahship mentioned, not even as a reason for putting him to death.

G. A. Wells

I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus. There are a lot of people who want to write sensational books and make a lot of money who say Jesus didn't exist. But I don't know any serious scholar who doubts the existence of Jesus.

Bart D. Ehrman

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