Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“When we meet God in the gospel, we first encounter him as a stranger, come to rescue us from a danger we did not even realize we were in.”
― Michael S. Horton, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples

“The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and narrow, confided to our own immediate knowledge, experience, and intuition. Trying desperately to get others, including God, to make us happy, we cannot seem to catch a glimpse of the real story that gives us a meaningful role.”
― Michael S. Horton

“You may think you find peace in Christ when you have no outward troubles, but is Christ your peace when the Assyrian comes into the land, when the enemy comes?...Jesus Christ would be peace to the soul when the enemy comes into the city, and into your houses.”
― Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land... I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. . . . The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass

“The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Better to be in trouble with Christ, than in peace without him.”
― Richard Sibbes

“God’s downward descent to us in grace reversed by our upward ascent in pragmatic enthusiasm, we are increasingly becoming a sheep without a Shepherd—and all in the name of mission. Instead of churching the unchurched, we are well on our way to even unchurching the churched.”
― Michael S. Horton, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church

“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.”
― Gordon S. Wood

“Though we have clear and full scriptures in the New Testament for abolishing the Ceremonial law, yet we nowhere read in all the new Testament of the abolishing of the Judicial law, so far as it did concern the punishing of sins against the Moral law, of which Heresy and seducing of souls is one, and a great one. Once God did reveal his will for punishing those sins by such and such punishments. He who will hold that the Christian Magistrate is not bound to inflict such punishments for such sins, is bound to prove that those former laws of God are abolished, and to shew some scripture for it.”
― George Gillespie

“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”
― H.L. Mencken

“College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss of humanity.”
― H. L. Mencken

“No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.”
― Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology -

“The Bible has little charity for those who reject it. It pronounces them to be either derationalized or demoralized, or both. [What is Darwinism (New York, 1874), p. 7]”
― Charles Hodge

“A philosophy which cannot be received until men cease to believe in their own existence, must be in extremis.

[What is Darwinism (New York, 1874), p. 17.]”
― Charles Hodge, What is Darwinism?

“This habit of using words which have no definite meaning is very convenient to writers, but very much the reverse for readers.

[What is Darwinism (New York, 1874), p. 21]”
― Charles Hodge

“I do not mean to exclude books of history, poetry, or even fables from our schools. They may and should be read frequently by our young people, but if the Bible is made to give way to them altogether, I foresee that it will be read in a short time only in churches and in a few years will probably be found only in the offices of magistrates and in courts of justice. (1786)”
― Benjamin Rush

“These are the times that try men's souls.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
― Thomas Paine

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“… why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others?

Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke’s attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41.”
― Thomas Paine, Rights of Man