We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.
– Martin Luther King
Excuse me. Do these shorts effectively hide my thunder?
– Tobias Fumke
I used to be a street performer.
It was hard. I was in the suburbs.
In a cul de sac.
– Demetri Martin
It’s kind of funny how so many Christians insist on absolute certainty when it comes to their own faith, while their evangelistic efforts rely on a level of uncertainty among others. … We demand that those on the other side of the conversation take all the risks—the risk of being wrong, the risk of learning something new, the risk of being changed.
– Rachel Held Evans
I imagine a school system that recognizes that learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. I imagine a school curriculum that values questions above answers … creativity above fact regurgitation … individuality above uniformity … and excellence above standardized performance.
– Tom Peters, excerpt from Re-Imagine
Mary represents the ‘rebel consciousness’ that is essential to Jesus’ gospel. Wherever the gospel is preached, we must remember that its good news will make you crazy. Jesus will put you at odds with the economic and political systems of our world. This gospel will force you to act, interrupting the world as it is in ways that make even pious people indignant.
– Emmanuel Katongole
The greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your mind, will all of your strength and with all of your soul. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.
– Jesus
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
– Desmond Tutu
Yeah, right.
– Don Flaco
Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something. You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When a whole society moves forward, this trampling is on a much bigger scale; and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle.
– India Gandhi
Brent: There’s children on the street using guns and knives
they’re taking drugs and each others lives
killing each other with knives and forks
callin each other names like dork
Jermaine: There’s people on the street gettin diseases from monkeys
yeah that’s what I said, they’re getting diseases from monkeys
now theres junkies with monkey disease
who’s touching these monkeys please
leave these poor sick monkeys alone
they got problems enough as it is
Brent: I see a man on the street
some punks chopped off his head
and I’m the only one who stops
to see if he’s dead
ooh…turns out he’s dead
– Flight of the Conchords
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
– Frederick Buechner
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.
– Deuteronomy 15:11
The idea that we would actually WANT to harm animals makes me soo angry that I just wanna, just wanna go out and punch a whale shark!
– Jesse (Relevant podcast)
Contemplation in the heart of the world
– Mother Teresa on prayer
If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer—and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.
– Wendell Berry
Help me Jeebus, help!…
Wait, I don’t even believe in Jeebus.
– Homer Simpson
Homer: What, you don’t eat ANY meats anymore? Not pork chops? Not bacon? Not sausages? Not ham?
Lisa: Dad, those are all from the same animal!
Homer: Yeah, Lisa, some magical *flying* animal.
He has torn down the wall of hostility between those who are near and far.
St. Paul
A bridge away from justified
A step away from whole
Restore my soul / Restore my soul
– Steve Hindalog wrote for the band The Choir on the album Circle Slide
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin but he who causes the darkness.”
– Victor Hugo
Yo soy un milleonair!
– David Lopez in Colombia, after imagining winning a US dollar in the lottery.
Profession is dependent upon the manufacture of need and the definition of new deficiencies.
– John McKnight
Whenever immoral laws are in place, a moral obligation exists to be illegal.
– Dr. Miguel de la Torre
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.
– Shane Claiborne
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… We are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act… We must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. –
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution in values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This is not just.”
The business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
– Martin Luther King
The Good News of Jesus Christ addresses the pervasive issues of de-humanization. Every human being is of infinite worth in the eyes of God who became a man and felt our vulnerabilities
– John Roush
All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.
– Benjamin Franklin
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
– Howard Zinn
Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.
– Archbishop Oscar Romero
I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.
– Dave Barry
Left Cheek: The Blog 