Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider

Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

Character | Church | Day | God | People | Wisdom |

William Penn

Men who fight about religion have no religion to fight about, since they do in the name of religion the thin which religion itself forbids. To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious. It were better to be of no church than to be bitter in any.

Better | Character | Church | Men | Religion |

Alain Pen name of Emile-Auguste Chartier

Religion condemns religion. It is not the school that is without God, it is the Church that is without God.

Church | God | Religion | Wisdom |

Richard Cecil

The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of the grace in the church and in the soul.

Church | Earth | Fury | Grace | Life | Life | Nature | Soul | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

Some political and social activities of the Catholic Church are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole... [e.g.] the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation [is] a serious obstacle to peace.

Birth | Church | Control | Peace | Time | Wisdom | Obstacle |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

Authority | Church | Conscience | Critic | Will | Wisdom | Zeal |

James Russell Lowell

The opening of the first grammar-school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.

Church | Wisdom |

Ralph S. Meadowcroft

The church of tomorrow must be universal. It cannot belong to a particular class, race or nation, but must transcend all such barriers so the brotherhood of man may be extended among us.

Brotherhood | Church | Man | Race | Tomorrow | Wisdom |

Vincenzo Monti

Abuse resembles a church procession; it always returns to the point from which it set out.

Abuse | Church | Wisdom |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. to me it is the extremist thinkable form of corruption, it has had the will to the ultimate corruption conceivably possible. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity, it has made of every value a disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind of integrity a vileness of soul. People still dare to talk to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! To abolish any state of distress whatever has been profoundly inexpedient to it: it has lived on states of distress, it has created states of distress in order to externalize itself.

Blessings | Church | Corruption | Distress | Integrity | Nothing | Order | People | Soul | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Value |

Thomas Paine

Time makes more Converts than Reason...the adulterous connection of church and state.

Church | Reason | Time | Wisdom |

Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger

The consciousness of abiding safety in the bosom of the Church is one of the most serious obstacles to an honest confrontation with the Christian faith.

Church | Consciousness | Faith |

Bishops' Pastoral Letter "Economic Justice For All" NULL

From the patristic period to the present, the Church has affirmed that misuse of the world’s resources or appropriation of them by a minority of the world’s population betrays the gift of creation since “whatever belongs to God belongs to all.”

Church | God | Present | World | God |

William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett

The decline of religion in modern times means simply that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of man’s life., and that the church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being.

Church | Life | Life | Man | Means | Religion |

Paul Billheimer

The continuous and widespread fragmentation of the church has been the scandal of the ages. It has been Satan’s master strategy. The sin of disunity probably has caused more souls to be lost than all other sins combined.

Church | Satan | Scandal | Sin |

George Arthur Buttrick

People are driven from the church not so much by stern truth that makes them uneasy, as by weak nothings that make them contemptuous.

Church | People | Truth |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Church | Miracles | Power | Rest |

John Cotton

Leave every church Independent; not Independent from brotherly Counsel, God forbid it that we should refuse that; but when it comes to power, that one Church shall have the power over the rest, then look for a Beast.

Church | Counsel | God | Power | Rest | God |