Quotations

Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.
-- A. Sachs

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupiry

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
-- Carl Sandburg

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
-- George Santayana

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the Universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
-- George Santayana

Nostalgia can generally be defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community -- qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one's birth.
-- from LOW LIFE by Luc Sante

It was a slaughter rather than a battle.
-- Schiller, 'Die Jungfrau von Orleans,' I. 9. 50.

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
-- Charles Schultz

My country right or wrong; when right, to keep her right; when wrong, to put her right.
-- Carl Schurz

From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.
-- Carl Schurz

Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth.
-- Stephen R. Schwambach

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
-- Albert Schweitzer

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
-- Seneca, 65 CE

Love is merely a madness....
-- William Shakespeare

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
-- William Shakespeare

Ah, but the choice of dreams to live,
there's the rub.
For all dreams are not equal,
some exit to nightmare
most end with the dreamer
But at least one must be lived... and died.
-- William Shakespeare

There are few die well that die in battle.
-- William Shakespeare, Henry V. Act IV. Sc. I.

We shall bend it to our awe, or break it all to pieces.
-- William Shakespeare, Henry V. Act I. Sc. 2.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- George Bernard Shaw

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Britannus (shocked): Caesar, this is not proper.
Theodotus (outraged): How?
Caesar (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
-- "Caesar and Cleopatra," act II, by George Bernard Shaw

When you stumble a lot, you start looking at your feet. We have to make people lift their eyes to the horizon and see the line of ancestors saying, "Make my life have meaning," and to our inheritors before us saying, "Create the world we will live in." We're not just holding jobs and having dinner, we are in the process of building the future.
-- John Sheridan, from Babylon5

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but, boys, it is all hell.
-- General William T. Sherman, at a speech at Columbus, Ohio, August 11, 1880, before G.A.R. veterans, reprinted and condensed to "War Is Hell," The Ohio State Journal, August 12, 1880.

A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.
-- Edgar A. Shoaff

Either I will find a way, or I will make one.
-- Phillip Sidney

I've always found it odd when people that purportedly believe in the Christian Bible want to restrict the exercise of one of the first gifts given to humanity by God, i.e. free will. If they pass laws that do not allow me the freedom to choose, haven't they robbed me of my God Given right (and responsibility) to choose?
-- Robert E. Simpson, Jr.

Fraternities and Sororities serve a useful purpose. If it was required they wear garishly colored garments with huge runic warning symbols that normal folks could see for hundreds of yards, they wouldn't touch 'em with a ten foot pole.
-- Robert E. Simpson, Jr.

Diplomacy has rarely been able to gain at the conference table what cannot be gained or held on the battlefield.
-- General Walter Bedell Smith

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.
-- Socrates

By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
-- Socrates

I thought I saw a burning light, saw angels fall into the night
'Oh we're with God' they cried, and with their God they died.
-- Sol Invictus

There cannot be a law abiding society if no one knows in advance what laws they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on 'evolving standards' rather than known rules.
-- Thomas Sowell

He that loseth wealth, loseth much; he that loseth friends, loseth more; but he that loseth his spirit loseth all.
-- Spanish maxim

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
-- Gene Spafford, 1992

Moral law must be in harmony with nature. Have we as a society stopped to weigh the impact on sexual morality of these changes?
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

When the social systems of the past fall, when yesterday's prohibitions fall, it is easy to believe that moral anarchy and even insanity will soon follow. The excesses that invariably accompany times of revolutionary change are sometimes enough to convince many that such an age has already arrived. In time, however, new laws and guidelines for self-restraint collect around newly perceived values, enabling them to flourish and to work for good.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Can a religious tradition that has long practiced circumcision and institutionalized celibacy ever dismiss any other practice on the basis of its unnaturalness?
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Prejudice always masquerades as rationality until it is exposed.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Indeed, quoting the Bible to prove a point in some dispute is both an inadequate and an inept response to any issue... When the Bible is quoted literally to affirm a particular moral stance or to condemn specific behavior, it might be well for the one quoting to read the text in its entirety. Selective literalism is a very weak basis upon which to argue for the condemnation of anything. Morality will not ever be sustained by biblical ignorance.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

What is it that makes us attribute to pre-modern Semites a universal wisdom, and makes us assume that their written words are free of ignorance, superstition, or prejudice?
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

There will always be individuals who will test the boundaries of any rule, but in our generation the rules have become so out of touch with reality that they are simply disregarded.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

The church must abandon its irrelevant ethical judgments that arise from realities that no longer exist and enter the arenas where life is lived, where people are hurt, where love is experienced, where ideals are compromised, where people awaken from their dreams, and be a part of the debate that will separate the ethics of life from the ethics of death.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

It is not lost on today's generation of women that the churches that believe the use of contraceptives to be sinful are the churches with an all-male clerical hierarchy in which celibacy is still required for membership.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Once again, the purpose of a claim of biblical literalism is revealed to be not to call people to the values of justice, but to justify existing prejudice by keeping oneself secure inside a way of life that cannot be challenged by any new insight.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Can modern men and women continue to pretend that timeless, eternal, and unchanging truth has been captured in the words of a book that achieved its final written form midway into the second century of this common era?
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

[W]e realize that we have all assumed a biblical literalism in the construction of our theological understandings of God, Jesus, and salvation. Unless theological truth can be separated from pre-scientific understandings and rethought in ways consistent with our understanding of reality, the Christian faith will be reduced to one more ancient mythology that will take its place alongside the religions of Mount Olympus.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Persecution is always revealing. One does not persecute something that does not scare, and it cannot scare unless it has appeal. ... Conversion in such a person is always dramatic. Earlier convictions, passionately held, cannot be passionately abandoned without a volcanic internal crisis.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Only something that shook the fragility of one's life support system could elicit the kind of killing hostility that Paul exhibited toward the Christians. Religious anger is always revealing.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Powerful emotional commitments to a controlling religious system reveal not so much devotion and virtue but troubled waters that will not stay calm. Fears that reside deep in our being always seem to rise up to shake our world, our securities -- fighting without, fears within. It is not surprising to me that time and time again the popular evangelistic preachers who speak so vehemently against the sins of the flesh wind up succumbing to the very fleshy sins they have condemned.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

Ecclesiastical claims to possess infallibility in any formulated version of Scripture and creed or in the articulations of any council, synod, or hierarchical figure are to me manifestations of idolatry. Such claims do not serve the truth. They serve only the power and control needs of the ecclesiastical institution. The church must embrace the subjective and relative character of everything it says and does. If the church provides security, it cannot provide truth. This is the choice that faces Christians today. I vote for insecurity and the pursuit of truth. The alternative, I believe, is security and the creation of a doomed idolatry.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

My quarrel is not with Bible and creeds but with the freezing of these instruments in time or with the assumption that somehow the Bible or the creeds escaped the subjectivity of the era that created them. The Bible and the creeds are windows into truth. They are not themselves the truth.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

My quarrel with fundamentalist and conservative Christians is not their right to believe as literally as they wish to believe. It is rather with their attempt to define Christianity so narrowly that only fundamentalists or conservatives can be included within the definition. It is their need to impose their truth on all Christians as the only truth that I resent. At this point biblical fundamentalism and the official position of the Roman Catholic church with its defined orthodoxy and papal claims to infallibility are remarkably similar, if not in form at least in intention.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

To view human life as depraved or as victimized by original sin is to literalize a premodern anthropology and a premodern psychology.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

To traffic in guilt as the church has done, to take the beauty and life-giving quality of sexual love and distort it with layer after layer of sexual guilt is simply no longer defensible, if it ever was.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

[N]o government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly on voluntary support.
-- Lysander Spooner

[R]eligion and science are two sides of the same coin. They both perceive the same point of view... they want to know how did we get here? What are we doing here? Where are we going? -and why are we here? They use different methodologies, but they're the same questions... and I think we have to treat them both with respect. Both can be misused, and both can be used productively. Faith and Reason are the shoes on your feet... you get further on both than on just one.
-- jms

My best to all of you. ... Meanwhile, take care, don't fight, and remember: if you do not choose to lead, you will forever be led by others. Find what scares you, and do it. And you can make a difference, if you choose to do so.
Babylon Control, clear.
-- jms

In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until it's too late.
-- Bruce Sterling - LA Times 2/20/92

Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.
-- Laurence Sterne

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.
-- Potter Stewart

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson

People usually think that the arts should only entertain, but that is not the role of the arts at all. The role of the arts is to explore the inner space of man; to find out how much and how intensely he can vibrate, through sound, through what he hears, whichever it is. They are a means by which to expand his inner universe.
-- Karlheinz Stockhausen

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