Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.
Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.
The only cure from sin is by maintaining a vision of God.
Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.
True love is willing to warn, reprove, confront or admonish when necessary.
Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.
Honest history is the weapon of freedom.
If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.
Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
History is, indeed, an argument without end.
The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.
In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.
Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.
For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible “mixed economy,” thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.
The passion for tidiness is the historian’s occupational disease.
Santayana’s aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.