Famous Quotes & Sayings

Francis Schaeffer

Today the separation of church and state is America is used to silence the church... The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent... It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas... To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers.

Francis Schaeffer

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God's revelation. Because the Christians had an absolute, universal standard by which to judge not only personal morals but the state, they were counted as enemies of totalitarian Rome and were thrown to the beasts.

Francis Schaeffer

If Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost.

Francis Schaeffer

Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful - Christian community is the final apologetic.

Francis Schaeffer

There is a sad myth going around today - the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well - unless you are a Christian.

Hugh Hefner

Being attacked by right-wing Christians did not bother me. Being attacked by liberal feminists did.

Hugh Jackman

I remember at one point being in fellowship, and everyone used to wear the fish symbol; it said you were a Christian. So I asked my father, 'Dad, why don't you wear that at work?' And he said, 'Your religion should be in your actions.' He set a great, great example.

Horace Mann

As an innovation... the establishment of Free Schools was the boldest ever promulgated, since the commencement of the Christian era... Time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, as beneficient as it was disinterested. It was one of those grand mental and moral experiments... The sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering.

Harry S Truman

I think there is an immense shortage of Christian charity among so-called Christians.

Harry S Truman

The United States, which would live on Christian principles with all of the peoples of the world, cannot omit a fair deal for its own Indian citizens.

J. M. Coetzee

It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.

J. K. Rowling

If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn't in FAO Schwarz.

J. K. Rowling

I did not set out to convert anyone to Christianity.

H. G. Wells

I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion

H. L. Mencken

New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

H. L. Mencken

The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.

H. L. Mencken

The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man.

H. L. Mencken

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

H. L. Mencken

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.

H. L. Mencken

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.

H. L. Mencken

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies. When they fail to come off its clergy simply say that they will be realized later on. Thus, if we have another boom, they will argue that the collapse of capitalism is only postponed. The fact that the greatest booms ever heard of followed Marx's formal prophecy of the downfall of capitalism is already forgotten, just as millions have long since forgotten the early Christian prophecy that the end of the world was at hand. The first Christians accepted postponements as docilely as the Communists of today.

H. L. Mencken

Christian--One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

H. L. Mencken

Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant.

H. L. Mencken

At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.

H. L. Mencken

The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.

H. L. Mencken

No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there.

H. L. Mencken

Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.

H. L. Mencken

What I got in Sunday school ... was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.

H. L. Mencken

On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.

H. L. Mencken

There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.

H. L. Mencken

The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.

Guglielmo Marconi

I am proud to be a Christian. I believe not only as a Christian, but as a scientist as well. A wireless device can deliver a message through the wilderness. In prayer the human spirit can send invisible waves to eternity, waves that achieve their goal in front of God.

Grace Paley

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.