David Pulliam > David's Quotes

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Don’t talk to your children about that which you have spoken little with God.”
― Tedd Tripp, Instructing a Child's Heart

“In 164 BC they defeat the Seleucid army, recapture Jerusalem, and cleanse the temple. To celebrate the cleansing of the temple, the Jewish festival of Hanukkah is instituted, a holiday that Jews continue to celebrate today.”
― J. Daniel Hays, The Temple and the Tabernacle: A Study of God's Dwelling Places from Genesis to Revelation

“Few moderns may think of the linear development of human history in the same terms the old Christians used, but the modern world of ideas is unimaginable without the irreversible linearity of connection and direction they provided. Everyone on the planet recognizes the Christian scheme of marking and pointing time’s arrow, even when we noncommittally mark our dates BCE/ CE.”
― James J. O'Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity

“A little simplicification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.” —Eleanor Roosevelt”
― Erin Boyle, Simple Matters: Living with Less and Ending Up with More

“paradox is more than that: it should entail a conflict between two deeply held convictions.”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“Another argument against extradition, offered by the observers the West German government sent to Jerusalem, was that Germany had abolished capital punishment and hence was unable to mete out the sentence Eichmann deserved. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi mass murderers, it is difficult not to suspect bad faith in this objection.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Eichmann’s own attitude was different. First of all, the indictment for murder was wrong: “With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter —I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it,” or, as he was later to qualify this statement, “It so happened ... that I had not once to do it”—for he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“An “idealist” was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Now he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that not only Hitler, not only Heydrich or the “sphinx” Müller, not just the S.S. or the Party, but the elite of the good old Civil Service were vying and fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these “bloody” matters. “At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Who was he to judge? Who was he “to have [his] own thoughts in this matter”? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“We had the whole population against us,” Jews hidden by Christian families could “be counted on the fingers of one hand,” perhaps five or six out of a total of thirteen thousand—but on the whole the situation had, surprisingly, been better in Poland than in any other Eastern European country.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Then came Eichmann’s last statement: His hopes for justice were disappointed; the court had not believed him, though he had always done his best to tell the truth. The court did not understand him: he had never been a Jew-hater, and he had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue. His virtue had been abused by the Nazi leaders. But he was not one of the ruling clique, he was a victim, and only the leaders deserved punishment.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers”
― G.K. Beale, God Dwells Among Us: Expanding Eden to the Ends of the Earth

“You ride a wave, you don’t conquer it,” Hamilton says. “The trick to surviving is knowing when you’re out-matched.”
― Scott Carney, What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

“In other words, every drug has a potential for side effects. In a way, the drug approach is a little like trying to swat a mosquito with a hand grenade. Sure, a grenade will kill a mosquito, but who knows what else might get caught in the explosion”
― Scott Carney, What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

“Sadly, rather than growing in a sense of need for and submission to the authority that God has placed in their lives, many children become emotional weathermen. They have come to understand that the rules of the house tend to change with the emotion of the parent who is present.”
― Paul David Tripp, Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

“My rule was simple: If something went badly, you had to put it in the log, characterize its severity, and make clear who was responsible for it. If a mistake happened and you logged it, you were okay. If you didn’t log it, you would be in deep trouble.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“The issue is binding authority.”
― R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church

“The only way to escape the rationalist claims of modernism or the hermeneutical nihilism of postmodernism is the doctrine of revelation—a return to the doctrine of sola Scriptura.”
― R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church

“In a secular age, everything appears to be negotiable. Doctrine can be reformulated. Anything objectionable to the zeitgeist can be removed. In a secularizing epoch, the church must constantly be aware of how even our thinking is seductively rearranged and recast.”
― R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church

“A stable and functional culture requires the establishment of stable marriages and the nurturing of families. Without a healthy marriage and family life as foundation, no lasting and healthy community can long survive.”
― R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church

“In one sense, just about everyone contributes something to the direction of the culture, starting in the home and then extending outward to civic involvement and engagement with other people. We are culture-making cultures.”
― R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church

“A person without a rich and complex past is like an infant, who has no ability to interpret any text.”
― Vern Sheridan Poythress, Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1-3

“We must allow, therefore, that God speaks in a way that meshes with the surrounding context, and also that he can say what he wishes to say, distinct from the context.”
― Vern Sheridan Poythress, Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1-3

“The person who is content with the sparse description in Genesis 1 knows that the first six days were like our days within providence, but also unlike, because they were days of God’s activity of initially creating instead of his activity of providential sustaining.”
― Vern Sheridan Poythress, Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1-3

“For some, faith was a life preserver, and life preservers had their place. She was simply more interested in learning to swim.”
― Maurice Broaddus, Pimp My Airship: A Naptown by Airship Novel