Amazing Grace Quotes

“He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Taken all together, it’s difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“The Scriptures were plain and could not be gainsaid on this most basic point: all that was his—his wealth, his talents, his time—was not really his. It all belonged to God and had been given to him to use for God’s purposes and according to God’s will. God had blessed him so that he, in turn, might bless others, especially those less fortunate than himself.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“There were effectively only two responses to the condition of the poor in Wilberforce’s day. One was to look down on them scornfully, moralistically judging them as inferior and unworthy of help. The other was to ignore them entirely, to see their plight as inevitable, part of the unavoidable price of “modern civilization.” But Wilberforce would introduce a third way of responding to the situation. This response would neither judge the poor and suffering nor ignore them, but rather would reach out to them and help them up, so to speak.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Glory, glory, said the Bee, Hallelujah, said the Flea. Praise the Lord, remarked the Wren. At springtime all is born-again.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“herding cats and shoveling smoke.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“accomplishments should be on the lips of all”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“The acutely Christian character of the British abolitionist movement is undeniable, for its leaders were all consciously acting out of the principles of their deeply held faith.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“The line between courageous faith and foolish idealism is, almost by definition, one angstrom wide.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple and lead not to meditation only, but to action.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“so true is it that a gracious hand leads us in ways that we know not, and blesses us not only without, but even against, our plans and inclinations.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“If the Weather is sultry, and there appears the least Perspiration upon their Skins, when they come upon Deck, there are Two men attending with Cloths to rub them perfectly dry, and another to give them a little Cordial…. They are then supplied with Pipes and Tobacco…they are amused with Instruments of Music peculiar to their own country…and when tired of music and Dancing, they then go to Games of Chance.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Oh may the warnings have their due effect in rendering us fit for the summons!”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“It wouldn’t be entirely clear to him until 1787, but in the meantime, as a first step in the right direction, Wilberforce championed two bills, both of which failed. One was for parliamentary reform and the other was a strange and ghoulish bill combining two macabre issues: putting an end to the burning of women at the stake, and selling the corpses of hanged criminals for dissection.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“To help them was tantamount to shaking one’s fist at God. Raising their sights from the vulgar spectacle of things like public hangings could rock the boat of civil society and mustn’t be attempted.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“They believed that in watching these burnings and dissections, they had an actual window into hell itself.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“The eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was the undisputed leader of the unfiltered pack and is believed, among other accomplishments, to have bedded seven thousand women; he is said to have snipped and kept a lock of hair from each of them.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“King George III himself, it must be pointed out, stood out as a rare and notable exception to the advanced moral decay of those around him. He was deeply sensitive to his symbolic position as the head of the country and sincerely wished to set an example for the subjects he ruled.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Like the proverbial dead fish that rots first from the head, British society began to decay from the top; so our description of the situation must begin with the aristocracy.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“By the time Wilberforce experienced his “Great Change,” all of the social problems that would plague eighteenth-century Britain had come to full flower, having been unchecked by the social conscience of genuine Christian faith for nearly a hundred years.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Britain continued to use the terms and the symbols of its religion and would never make a vulgar Gallic show of executing clerics, but it would reject real religion nonetheless.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“And so, in keeping with its national character, Britain chose a more civilized and decorous path away from religion: it would staunchly retain the outward trappings and forms of religion—which were all well and good and would help keep the lower classes better behaved—but it would deny religion any real power.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“When eighteenth-century British society had retreated from the historical Christianity it had earlier embraced, the Christian character of the nation—which had given Britain, among other things, a proud tradition of almshouses to help the poor, dating all the way back to the tenth century—had all but disappeared.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“most Britons went about their lives with no idea of the universe of horrors that existed under the British flag or the nightmarish way of life of the slaves, whose existence was nonetheless intimately intertwined with their own way of life thousands of miles away.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Most British citizens had never seen anyone branded or whipped or subjected to thumbscrews. They had no idea that conditions on West Indian sugar plantations were so brutal that most of the slaves were literally worked to death in just a few years and most of the female slaves were too ill to bear children.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Who would have known that much of the wealth in their nation’s booming economy was created on the other side of the world by the most brutal mistreatment of other human beings, many of them women and children?”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“The sugar and molasses from those plantations came to England, but who could have known of the nightmarish institution of human bondage that attended their making?”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Of the many societal problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“Americans have an outsized tendency to romanticize the past, to see previous eras as magically halcyon and idyllic, and of no era would this be truer than the eighteenth century in Britain.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“the suppression of the Slave Trade
and the reformation of manners.”
― Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery