Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leo Tolstoy

Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government.

Leo Tolstoy

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

Leo Tolstoy

A Christian cannot help being free, because in the pursuit and attainment of his object, no one can either hinder or retard him.

Leo Tolstoy

We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated.

Leo Tolstoy

To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

Leo Tolstoy

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

Peter Kreeft

Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.

Peter Kreeft

Few Christians go into media or the arts today, or see it as a primary mission field or battlefield. But it is.

Peter Kreeft

The greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing them the closest to God - so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst.

Peter Kreeft

The church is: a conspiracy of love for a dying world, a spy mission into enemy occupied territory ruled by the powers of evil; a prophet from God with the greatest news the world has ever heard, the most life changing and most revolutionary institution that has existed on earth.

Peter Fonda

Muslims want the whole world to be Muslim. Christians want the whole world to be Christian. Catholics, Protestants, Mormons. They're all the same. Far out, right? Everyone wants the world to be like them.

Peter Hollingworth

I'd have to say, and I think that most Christians would hold the view, that there is such a thing as evil, and there are evil forces at work. You can articulate that by talking about Satan or the Devil; that's sound, Scriptural teaching.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal".

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Phyllis Bottome

That a Jew is despised or persecuted is bad for him, of course-but far worse for the Christian who does it-for although persecuted he can remain a good Jew-whereas no Christian who persecutes can possibly remain-if he ever was one-a good Christian.

Philip Pullman

I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.

Philip Pullman

I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book.

Philip Pullman

The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.

Philip Pullman

All the stories of the Bible that I know came to me first from my grandfather's lips. He would see stories in everything. He told stories very easily and very generously, so I loved him for that. He was a simple man, a Victorian; he was born in 1890-something. He saw no reason and had never seen any reason to question his Christian faith. His faith was strong and simple and that's it. And I, like his other grandchildren and the children in his parish, sheltered underneath it.

Rachel Griffiths

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality.

Queen Victoria

There is, however, another subject on which the Queen feels most strongly, and that is this horrible, brutalizing, un-Christian-like vivisection…It must really not be permitted. It is a disgrace to a civilized country.

Queen Latifah

I was baptized a Baptist, but I'm just Christian, as far as I'm concerned. I could go in any church, doesn't matter if it's Baptist, Protestant, Episcopal, or Catholic.

It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write that the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and, second, civil liberty.

Jostein Gaarder

A Russian cosmonaut and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing Christianity. The brain surgeon was a Christian, but the cosmonaut wasn’t. ‘I have been in outer space many times,’ bragged the cosmonaut, ‘but I have never seen any angels.’ The brain surgeon stared in amazement, but then he said, ‘And I have operated on many intelligent brains, but I have never seen a single thought.

Joseph Brant

Do you call yourselves Christians? Does then the religion of Him whom you call your Savior inspire your spirit, and guide your practices? Surely not. It is recorded of him that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you declare to the world your hypocrisy. Cease, too, to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty than they.

Kevin Hart

I think what happens in a religious life is that we have those experiences of affirmation and that one starts to live a Christian life or a Jewish life or a Muslim life or a Buddhist life, by affirming that affirmation each day. Each day you say 'Yes' to that Yes. So the life of being a Christian for example, is always a life of double affirmation, that you each day say 'Yes' to those counter-experiences of saying 'Yes', even when you're not experiencing them at that time, you're remaining loyal to that experience.

Kevin Hart

I think poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people. The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people, whether Christian or not, how to pray.

Kevin Hart

Divine love, agape, is self-sacrificing love, which sounds difficult, as it is, and not very attractive. If the best image we have of love is of a man who's been tortured and hung upon a cross to die an excruciating death, this is something that human beings find very, very hard to understand as love. But it is the highest Christian image of love.

Keith Green

When I die I just want to be remembered as a Christian.

Keith Green

Why do we idolise Christian singers and speakers? We go from glorifying musicians in the world to glorifying Christian musicians. It's all idolatry!Satan is getting a great victory as we seem to worship these ministers on tapes and records and clammer to get their autographs in churches and concert halls from coast to coast.

Keith Green

I would have met Jesus sooner if not for Christians who led double lives.

Keith Green

This generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of souls on the earth!

Keith Miller

A Christian marriage is [not] one with no problems or even a marriage with fewer problems. (It may well mean more problems.) But it does mean a life in which two people are able to accept each other and love each other in the midst of problems and fears. It means a marriage in which selfish people can accept selfish people without constantly trying to change them -- and even accept themselves, because they realize personally that they have been accepted by Christ.