Samuel Adams
If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you and may posterity forget that you were once our countrymen.
C.S. Lewis
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
C.S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.
John Stuart Mill
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
Elie Wiesel
The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy; it is indifference. And the opposite of life is not death; it is indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Martha Washington
I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
John Keats
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, in as much as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
George Washington
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
Theodore Roosevelt
If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.
Madeline L'Engle
It is only by accepting real guilt that I am able to feel free of guilt... if I am not free to accept guilt when I do wrong, then I am not free at all. If all my mistakes are excused, if there's an alibi, a rationalization for every blunder, then I am not free at all. I have become subhuman.
Madeline L'Engle
The sects and fundamentalists are growing because they offer black-and-white answers to all the unanswerable questions. The frightened person is given all the rules and assured that the few people who keep the rules and accept the answers to the unanswerable questions will be saved, and everybody else will be damned. The damnation of others seems to be a large part of the pleasure of accepting the answers to the unanswerable questions.
Madeline L'Engle
The marvelous thing about sacramental confession is that... the offense is wiped away. We are not to dwell on it anymore, but to go on afresh with our lives, knowing ourselves forgiven, restored, loved. My tendency has often been to go back and dwell on my mistakes, but my confessor... taught me not to go back and play in the garbage. Let it go. Get on with your life, understanding that God has wiped out the sin. And what God has wiped out we may not take up again, otherwise, it becomes an idol.
Lewis B. Smedes
The highest respect you can show people is to let them take responsibility for their own actions. Love has this power, the power to let people be responsible for hurting us... When we really love people with respect, we let them be accountable for what they do to us. And then we face the crisis of forgiving.
