Great Throughts Treasury

"A competitive society is a society of envy."

"We are afraid of religion because it interprets rather than just observes. Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allow to starve."

"It is through a religious act that people set meaning over against meaninglessness, wholeness over against being fragmented, courage over against fear."

"What is important is not what someone is but what he is waiting for. Not the events of life but its possibilities."

"If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive."

"Reagan was a master at playing on the deep-seated anxieties of people caught up in massive technological change. He exploited their fear of inflation and the loss of jobs and turned it toward a different point — namely, sexuality. It is not the nuclear bomb that threatens our survival: it is love between two men or two women that endangers everything we have achieved!"

"If we do not [use our tradition], it will use us."

"I am often impatient when believers ask me: ‘Are you a Marxist?’ The best reply I can think of is a counter-question: ‘Do you brush your teeth? I mean, since the toothbrush has been invented?’ How can anyone read Amos and Isaiah, and not Marx and Engels? That would be absolute ingratitude toward a God who sends us prophets with the message that to know YHWH means to do justice. Are we not obliged to do use every analytic tool that can help us to comprehend injustice and at the same time reveal the victims of injustice as the possible forces for change that can break the spell of oppression for both the oppressors and the oppressed? Can we afford to ignore Marx at a time when I ought to be clear to every attentive observer of the misery of the Third World that capitalism neither can nor will satisfy hunger? Our economic system works for the rich, not for the other two-thirds of the human family."

"The main difficulty is that the victims of the system are often invisible for us living in the middle class of the rich world. For the biblical story – the Poor are our Teachers... Free me O God from the dreadful historical role of the middle class rich countries. I believe that freedom, a deeper inner idea of freedom will not be attained until we are free of bombs, free of poison gas, free of the arms industry and free of this whole cancer that overruns our entire life, defines our cities, rules our research and terrorizes our landscapes with its low flying aircraft that cause school children to scream and cry at night because they are disturbed."