Mark > Mark's Quotes

“When it comes to Jesus, all we have are memories. There are no lifelike portraits from his day, no stenographic notes recorded on the spot, no accounts of his activities written at the time. Only memories of his life, of what he said and did. Memories written after the fact. Long after the fact. Memories written by people who were not”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior

“what might happen if computers were empowered to handle life-and-death choices: What if the machines figure out they’re less expendable than we are? That”
― M.A. Rothman, Primordial Threat

“Skiff?” “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.”
― M.A. Rothman, Primordial Threat

“Seven planetary deities, borrowed from Babylon and Egypt, are commemorated in the seven branches of the Menorah, or sacred candlestick (see 1. 6). They were combined into a single transcendental deity at Jerusalem—”
― Robert Graves, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

“The historical Jesus did not make history. The remembered Jesus did.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior

“Brings to mind the old Arthur C. Clarke quote,” Shepard said. “You know, the one about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Anyone capable of harnessing the power of nature would have been worshiped by people far more primitive.”
― James D. Prescott, The Fifth Kind: Arrival

“characterizing Christians as criminally minded people whose meetings were covers for secret rituals involving “people of both sexes, and all ages,” including children, in group orgies:”
― Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

“Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves—as Jews who had found God's messiah—we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.”
― Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

“Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“summons’ that called the Jewish people to action.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography

“The irony”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“The longing for love is a flawed piece of human coding. It scrambles every circuit in your brain”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“life isn’t always a series of binary choices. Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“realize that my way of coping now will change over time as my cognitive abilities change. I also trust that at the deepest level”
― Sharon Lukert, Until My Memory Fails Me: Mindfulness Practices for Cultivating Resilience and Self-Compassion in the Face of Cognitive Decline