"Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night.
Just when we think we're safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks,
and there's no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down.
Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy?"
Frederick Buechner, Godric

"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act - that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.
Now suppose that you came to a country where you could fill a theatre
by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see,
just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon,
should you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?"
Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity

"In essentials, unity;
in inessentials, liberty;
in everything, charity."
George Cassander, ca. 1560

"Today the danger of the pro-life movement which I vigorously support
is that it can be frighteningly selective.
The rights of the unborn and the dignity of the age-worn are pieces of the same pro-life fabric.
We weep at the unjustified destruction of the unborn.
Did we also weep when the evening news reported from Arkansas
that a black family had been shot-gunned out of a white neighborhood?...
When we laud life and blast abortionists, our credibility as Christians is questionable.
On one hand we proclaim the love and anguish,
the pain and joy that goes fashioning a single child.
We proclaim how precious each life is to God and should be to us.
On the other hand, when it is the enemy that shrieks to heaven with his flesh in flames,
we do not weep, we are not shamed; we call for more."
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

"There is but one art that fully fulfills its function, and that is music."
Albert Camus (1913-1960), "Essay on Music"

"The cool thing about music is how unnecessary it is.
Of all things, music is the most frivolous and the most useless.
You can't eat it, you can't drive it,
you can't live in it, you can't wear it.
But your life wouldn't be worth much without it."
Rich Mullins

"There is music you make and there is music that makes you."
Rich Mullins

"These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing.
No glory, no gallant last words...
only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question: 'Why?'
I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived.
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
Too much sanity may be madness... Perhaps to be practical is madness.
And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be."
Man of La Mancha (1965)

"Young people should remain idealistic all their lives. If you have to choose between being Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
for heaven's sake, be the Don."
Ramsey Clark

"Tonight one person in five in the United States will go to bed hungry. Thirty million more are undernourished.
Many are committed Christians. Is this the victorious life?"
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."
H. L. Mencken

"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."
Roland Young (a newscaster at KSAN Berkeley, CA in 1968)

"We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic.
It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality.
We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.'...
It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick....
Covetousness we call ambition. Hoarding we call prudence. Greed we call industry."
Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline

"...it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor."
Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"Money does not deserve our respect.
It deserves to be conquered in the power of the Spirit.
Once defeated and converted to the way of Christ, it can then be used without being served."
Richard J. Foster, The Challenge of The Disciplined Life

"He did not go to the cross to ornament and embellish our life. If we wish to have him,
then he demands the right to say something decisive about out entire life."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity" (seminary lecture, 1928)

"Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour.
The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own suffering,
but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ died."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years

"Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags."
Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"Knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence.
Without history, a society shares no common memory of where it has been,
of what its core values are, or what decisions in the past account for the present circumstance."
David McCullough

"History is a novel that did happen; the novel is history as it might have happened."
Messrs. Goncourt, Idées et sensations

"Traditionalism: the dead faith of the living. Tradition: the living faith of the dead."
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Volume I of V)

"But I am involved. We are all involved!"
Rebel Without a Cause, "Jim Stark" (James Dean)

"Until you come to terms with your heritage, you'll never be at peace with yourself."
Rich Mullins

"I am tired of criticism, of disparagement, of spitefulness--of nihilism, in short."
Albert Camus, Actuelles