Favorite Quotations

Selaphiel

Selaphiel

Well-known member
David Bentley Hart on theologies/theologians that claim the damnation of others is compatible with heavenly bliss, or that the blessed will delight in their damnation:

"The logical defficiencies in such language are obvious. I mean, what after is a person other than the whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments and affinities. Who are we other than all the others who has made us who we are? And to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others. To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed, or worse: increase the pitiless bliss of heaven, is also to say that no person can possibly be saved.

For if the memories of others are removed or lost, or once knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference, or God forbid into greater beatitude. What then remains of one and ones last bliss? Some other being altogether surely. A spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection or the residue of a soul reduced to no one, but not a person. But it is not the logic that bothers me, but the moral hideousness."
 
Selaphiel

Selaphiel

Well-known member
"Who is the devil? And what is he like? Better: what ails him? For the devil can only be described, according to long theological tradition, by his deficiencies.

The deficiency most immediately accessible is that the devil's humor is always mere wit; he is never truly funny. God is both witty and funny; and so sometimes, in God's trail, are we. The devil is only witty. Or, as Luther put it, he is a "sour spirit", a spirit at all because he like all spirits has humor, but a sour one. The devil's jokes are never on himself.

Indeed, if one were to speak more mythologically than even yet I am willing to do, and talk of Satan as a fallen angel, one could say that this is how he fell: he could not take God's big joke on him and the other spirits. He refused to join Michael and the others in service to those mere animals, those humans down there, whom God impishly and foolhardily proposed to elevate unto himself, and service to whom God promised to assign the great spirits."

-Robert Jenson
 
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This Charming Manc

This Charming Manc

Well-known member
All fantasy just like your politics :)

But some good ones in there.

Stripe said:
"That doesn't make sense to me. But, then again, you are very small."
- John Rhys-Davies, Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers.

"Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas!"
- Alan Rickman, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
http://youtu.be/LUDntpV_HdQ

"That coffee is three hours cold. I put a cigarette out in it."
- Lance Henriksen, The Terminator.

"No. Not without incident."
- Christian Bale, Equilibrium.
http://youtu.be/y_JGI0JhCkQ?t=13s

"Look, a elephant!"
- Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Last Action Hero.
http://youtu.be/x0_FYrnnbz0?t=57s

"Come on, you apes! You want to live forever?!"
- Casper Van Dien, Starship Troopers.
http://youtu.be/UExDaTcSUcg?t=3m49s

"You're hit, man. You're bleeding!"
"I ain't got time to bleed."
"Oh. OK. You got time to duck?"
- Richard Chaves & Jesse Ventura, Predator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTinjZequR0

"William H. Bonney. You are not a god."
"Why don't you pull the trigger and find out?"
- Kiefer Sutherland & Emilio Esteves, Young Guns II.
http://youtu.be/4HKjfsXaOr4?t=9s

"In fact, if one of those Swiss boys ever come across a pretty girl, he probably yell, "eins, zwei, drei" and try to push her down some ice."
- Doug E. Doug, Cool Runnings.
http://youtu.be/6O2F9U4hHMU?t=8s

"Damn, Buzz, shot twice in the same day!"
- Kevin Costner, A Perfect World.
http://youtu.be/MXr1rQewj2w?t=2m4s

"Aw, here comes Shockwave! "
- Reno Wilson, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

＂大哥是對的＂
- Takeshi Kaneshiro, The Warlords.
http://youtu.be/kx-xlSfUnPY?t=16s

"Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud. "
- Robert Arkins, The Commitments.

" I don't have to do nothin' but stay black and die! "
- Morgan Freeman, Lean on me.
http://youtu.be/7od1hMRjK88?t=16s

"Did you just see a real bright light?"
- Stan Yale, The Terminator.

"Look at it this way, in a hundred years, who's going to care?"
- Bess Motta, The Terminator.

"I sense injuries. The data could be called pain."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator 2, Judgement Day.

"They have a cave troll."
- Sean Bean, The Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring.
http://youtu.be/UAyh23l1mx4

"Do me a favour, Hippy and stay off my side."
- Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss.

"Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads."
- Christopher Lloyd, Back to the Future.
http://youtu.be/flge_rw6RG0?t=8s

"Him? That can't be William Wallace. I'm prettier than this man!"
- David O'Hara, Braveheart.

"I didn't like him anyway. He wasn't right in the head."
- David O'Hara, Braveheart.

"We're back, we're bad, you're black, I'm mad."
- Mel Gibson, Lethal Weapon 2.
http://youtu.be/b0CuUw0_QWY?t=14s

"The Almighty says this must be a fashionable fight. It's drawn the finest people."
- David O'Hara, Braveheart.

"Every man dies, not every man really lives."
- Mel Gibson, Braveheart.

"You don't speak Latin? Well that's something we shall have to remedy, isn't it?"
- James Cosmo, Braveheart.

"You dropped your rock."
- Mel Gibson, Braveheart.

"No thanks. I choose Life!"
- John Leguizamo, Ice Age.
http://youtu.be/4m604_bEuNw?t=8s

"Welcome to downtown Coolsville. Population, us."
- Eli Marienthal, The Iron Giant.

"Winners always want the ball when the game's on the line."
- Gene Hackman, The Replacements.

"There's a rule in sports. Never do anything great if you can't handle the congratulations."
- John Madden, The Replacements.

"You who are without mercy now plead for it? I thought you were made of sterner stuff."
- Peter Cullen, Transformers, the Movie.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he never existed."
- Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects.

"Seriously, how often do you really look at a man's shoes?"
- Morgan Freeman, The Shawshank Redemption.

"Dynamite drop-in, Monte. That broadcast school has really paid off."
- Harry Doyle, Major League II.

"Thanks for pushing that, Bob. The light's on but you never know, it really might be broken."
- Robert Mailhouse, Speed.

"Usually they fall down now."
- Richard Lineback, Speed.

"Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range."
"Hey, just what you see, pal."
"The Uzi nine millimeter."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger & Dick Miller, The Terminator.

"I want a really big gun that holds a lot of bullets."
"God bless you, my son!"
- Christian Slater and Roger Rook, Kuffs.

"All the terrorists in the world and I had to kill one with feet smaller than my sister's."
- Bruce Willis, Die Hard.
Click to expand...
 
Aimiel

Aimiel

Well-known member
Mine is: "Great it is to stand in youth and dream a dream, but better still to fight life through and stand at the end and say: THE DREAM WAS TRUE."
 
Selaphiel

Selaphiel

Well-known member
Always room for some more Jenson:

"What the church in her self-identification has denoted by "the gospel" is the message of the crucified one's resurrection. But much theology has proceeded as if the Crucifixion were by itself the encompasssing burden of the message, as if "Jesus died for us" were itself the defining claim. Theologians have too often constructed their systems as if Christ fully accomplished our salvation at Golgatha, and was raised only because, being immortal God, he could not remain dead, or as the consequence for the human Jesus of what he did on the cross. When Friedrich Schleiermacher concluded that faith in the Ressurection "does not belong to the foundational elements of faith in Christ...," he was only betraying an attitude deeply buried in the theological tradition. [...]

But so far from right was Schleiermacher that it would be more scripturally plausible to say that the Crucifixion was not an original element of faith in Christ. At the very beginning, Jesus' death was mostly a difficulty for believers. And the gospel could be proclaimed without attributing any salvific causality to the execution as such. Thus in Peter's paradigmatic sermon in Acts the Crucifixion appears simply as that which God overcomes by the salvific Resurrection. "This man...you crucified...But God raised him up...""

-Robert Jenson (Systematic theology vol.1)
 
theophilus

theophilus

Well-known member
Guilt is the painful companion of death. ~Coco Chanel

*Been thinking about this since I heard it (a couple of weeks ago) and am working on building an evangelistic presentation around it.
 
nikolai_42

nikolai_42

Well-known member
Man's genius often sounds elevated, but here is just a small sample of evidence that even the most respected men in business and science are...um...less than perfect :

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, President of IBM (1943)
{Supposedly, IBM also informed Xerox about 15 years later that there was a world market for maybe 5,000 copy machines}

"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." - Daryl F. Zanuck, 20th Century Fox (1946)

"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years."
- Alex Lewyt, president of Lewyt vacuum company (1955)

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olsen, Founder of DEC (1977)

"Two years from now, spam will be solved."
- Bill Gates (2004)

"Fooling around with alternating current is a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever."
- Thomas Edison (1889)
{Edison had already come up with DC years before Nikolai Tesla - who worked with Edison briefly after coming to the US - discovered AC. They would champion their own systems until the 1893 Worlds Fair when they bid against each other - Westinghouse backing Tesla and JP Morgan backing Edison - for the right to power the fair. Tesla won and the rest is history (though he died basically penniless).}

“A rocket will never be able to leave Earth’s atmosphere.”
- New York Times (1936)

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.”
- Michigan Savings Banker to Henry Ford's lawyer (1903)

"We can close the books on infections diseases."
- US Surgeon General William H. Stewart (1969)

And how's this for irony :

"It will be years - not in my time - before a woman becomes Prime Minister"
- Margaret Thatcher (1969)
 
annabenedetti

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967
 
zoo22

zoo22

Well-known member
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Isaac Asimov
 
H

Husband&Father

New member
Angel4Truth said:
"Tolerance is only another name for indifference" ~ William Somerset Maugham
Click to expand...

Do you know when or where Somerset Maugham said or wrote this?

It does not seem to me to be something he would say. He preached tolerance and would be insulting himself with this quote. He was not a very tolerant guy himself, in-fact he was a real jerk. He could be super mean to anyone who crossed him. He was a guy who could use tolerance due to his homosexuality not someone who would claim tolerance was a cop-out and the refuge of cowards. Although I know he is widely credited with the quote and he himself took credit for it in his writers notebook. He claimed he said it in 1892 but gave no citation.

In any case I like the way Chesterton expressed the same sentiments. He said:
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance. [“Puritan and Anglican,” The Speaker, December 15, 1900. Reprinted in The Chesterton Review, vol.9, no. 4]
 
H

Husband&Father

New member
Chesterton had a way of bringing a point home, very much like the skill Ben Franklin had. On abortion, which Chesterton vehemently opposed as an assault on the family, he demonstrated the absurdity of killing babies in the womb by comparing abortion to the way humans treat unwanted kittens.
He pointed out that we don't kill kittens before they are born so why should we kill babies before birth? Why not wait until after they are born in-case we happen to like one of them?
So one of my favorite quotes and one of my favorite examples of Chestertonian wit is:

"Let all the babies be born; then let us kill the ones we do not like"
 
H

Husband&Father

New member
As I mentioned above Chesterton opposed abortion as a direct assault on the family. He also condemned homosexuality (which he called "Highly Civilized Sin" when it was practiced by the elite of society like his contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and W. Somerset Maugham) and birth control for the same reasons. One of my favorite Chesterton quotes because of it's prophetic nature is:

“This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”
 
H

Husband&Father

New member
People tried to discredit Chesterton and Christianity by pointing out that conventional wisdom said there was no such thing as ghosts. As usual Chesterton has a snappy answer to a stupid question.

A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England -- if anything, it proves its existence. - G.K. Chesterton 1925
 
H

Husband&Father

New member
" About the time of the end , a body of men will be raised up , who will turn their attention to the prophecies and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition." - Sir Isaac Newton
 
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