Rob > Rob's Quotes

“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
― Mae West

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain

“To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.”
― Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty

“You would have me burn your enemies for the glory of your kingdom, little fleck? In a thousand years Tadroth will be only a legend. In two thousand, even the legend will be forgotten. When you and all you make are dust in a grave, only I will remain. Why should I care how many kings rule this land for a season? Why should I care if your Serian lives or dies?”
― David G. Hartwell, Year's Best Fantasy

“You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“I find that being grimly aware of mortality can make me steadfastly determined to enjoy life where life can be enjoyed. It makes me value precious moments with my children, and with the woman I love. It adds intensity in bad ways, but also good ways.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“A mature Christian recognizes that correcting every wrong on the Internet would take more hours than a full-time job. If you snap every time your great-aunt’s friend’s cousin thrice-removed makes a snarky comment about “all the contradictions in the Bible,” it will consume you and your joy.”
― Ed Stetzer, Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

“Three sols later, Lewis Valley opened into a wide plain. So, again, I was left without references and relied on Phobos to guide me. There’s probably symbolism there. Phobos is the god of fear, and I’m letting it be my guide. Not a good sign.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“The next major storm would cause the Great Martian Potato Migration.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Most of us assume that what we believe is right (of course we do—it is why we believe what we believe) but have never really studied for ourselves. We were simply told, “This is the way it is,” and didn’t question. The problem is much of what we believe is often based more on comfort or our culture’s tradition than on the Bible.”
― Francis Chan, Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit

“Nowhere in Scripture do I see a “balanced life with a little bit of God added in” as an ideal for us to emulate. Yet when I look at our churches, this is exactly what I see: a lot of people who have added Jesus to their lives. People who have, in a sense, asked Him to join them on their life journey, to follow them wherever they feel they should go, rather than following Him as we are commanded.”
― Francis Chan, Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit

“It’s crazy to realize how much  justice  and  righteousness,  peacemaking,  care  for the environment, solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed, and even loving your neighbor, pale in comparison to sexual morality in so many of our churches.”
― Kyle Roberts, A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary was a Virgin and Why It Matters

“When Christianity looks nothing like Christ, sacrificial love is replaced with brute force, and allegiance to Jesus is supplanted by allegiance to nation.”
― Stephen Mattson, The Great Reckoning: Surviving a Christianity That Looks Nothing Like Christ

“many people abandon their Christian faith because they mistake the murky labels of Christianity as being the same thing as Christ.”
― Stephen Mattson, The Great Reckoning: Surviving a Christianity That Looks Nothing Like Christ

“It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“can never understand these people who rush to buy new gadgets; surely they must see that they are going to look like idiots in about a year when the manufacturers come up with tiny lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price. Like the people who paid $200 for the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were being given away at gas stations. Or the people who bought the first color televisions.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active and dramatic embodiment of the European—and especially the Mediterranean—mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-Christians; a latter-day Crusader in search of personal wealth and fame, who expected the enormous and mysterious world he had found to be filled with monstrous races inhabiting wild forests, and with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought.”
― David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

“Miller traveled all over New England and spoke in hundreds of churches confident that in just a few days he would see the Lord face to face. What a blow he was setting himself up for. Yet we don’t want to be too harsh against Miller. He received no earthly benefit from his testimony. He gained no earthly wealth; he lost his reputation and accrued much heartache pursuing the course he felt called toward. Miller was a sincere man; there is no doubt of that. His error was that he did not believe Christ literally meant that “no one knows the day nor the hour” (Matthew 24:36.)”
― Teresa Beem, It's Ok Not to be a Seventh-Day Adventist

“He opposed the militaristic nationalism of the new Germany, rooted in “blood and soil,” even as the German Evangelical Church and most of its leaders succumbed to the new ideology. By the early period of the war, the embrace of Nazi ideology at all levels of society had led to the complete corruption of social and personal ethical behavior among most Germans.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The hungry person needs bread, the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom” (p. 97). Treating human beings as things, commodities, and machines is a special hindrance to receiving Christ”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The failure of reasonable people is appalling; they cannot manage to see either the abyss of evil or the abyss of holiness. With the best intentions they believe that, with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints. In their defective vision they want to be fair to both sides, and so they are crushed between the colliding forces without having accomplished anything at all. Bitterly disappointed that the world is so unreasonable, they see themselves condemned to ineffectiveness. They withdraw in resignation or fall helplessly captive to the stronger party.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Bad shit happens to good people all the time and it's not God trying to test your mettle. It's just bad fucking shit and we all go through it. If you like the idea of God and of putting your faith in something bigger than you to help you through, I think that's great. Ultimately, though, it's you who has to solve the problem.”
― E.B. Davis II, How Not To Be An Asshole: 21st century life lessons for those with their heads up their asses

“To them, for me to move to a cabin in the mountains, where I didn’t know a single person, had no job, it was like I was giving up. They were goddamn right.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“A part of me always dreamed of this, never having to work again, moving far away from everyone I knew. In the mountains no one was trying to gauge themselves against me. It was just snow, trees, the mountain sky, and the whipped disks of clouds above the peaks. The town below me, well within view. And full of strangers, which was what I wanted. If I was left alone then there was no one for me to hate.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us