The number one problem in our world is alienation, rich versus poor, black versus white, labor versus management, conservative versus liberal, East versus West . . . But Christ came to bring about reconciliation and peace.Billy Graham
"Courage is not the absence of fear. It is feeling afraid to do something but finding the strength to do it.”Fr. Walter J. Burghardt
"Maryknoll?! You are troublemakers! Thank God!"Bishop Desmond Tutu
“We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.”Bob Herbert
“We are defined as a nation by how we treat those who have chosen to hurt us.”Rev. Ian Galloway
"The perpetration of an atrocity and outrage cannot and should not be a basis for losing sight of who we are, the values we seek to uphold, and the faith and beliefs by which we seek to live."Kenny MacAskill
"Many were outraged by what was perceived to be opportunities for British businesses coming before keeping a convicted murderer in prison. However, economic interests routinely trump concern for human rights or justice when the U.K. and U.S. engage with other countries, a state of affairs that continues week in week out, with the approval or silent complicity of the same politicians who reacted so furiously to the al-Megrahi decision."Ben White
"'Going home' is a journey to the heart of who we are, a place where we can be ourselves and welcome the reality of our beauty and our pain. From this acceptance of ourselves, we can accept others as they are and we can see our common humanity."Jean Vanier
"At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being."Rudolf Otto Hertz
I am "glad we're no longer torturing anyone—ceasing this foul practice will not in any way make Americans safer." It may seem ridiculous, but the debate over torture "has been infected with silly arguments" about whether it works. It's impossible to say that torture, or at least the threat of it, doesn't ever work, but that's hardly the point. "America should repudiate torture not because it is always ineffective—nothing is always anything—or because others loathe it but because it degrades us and runs counter to our national values."Richard Cohen
"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere... I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."George W. Bush
“We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset -- in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.”President Barack Obama
"Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor."Wernher von Braun (1912 - 1977)
"It says so much about this country [the United States] that we respond to Bernard Madoff with outrage and to mass shootings with teddy bears and candles."Dahlia Lithwick
"Social sin is the crystallization ... of individuals’ sins into permanent structures that keeps sin in being and makes its force to be felt by the majority of people."Oscar Romero
"Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."Holocaust Museum
"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all—the apathy of human beings."Helen Keller
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning."Frederick Douglass
"Why do people think the spiritual life demands withdrawal from the ordinary? Because they've been taught, at least by implication, that the physical is a block to the spiritual. When we assume that the spiritual, unlike the physical, is impervious to corrosion, then we assume that all things material are not to be honored. But the fact of the matter is, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual."Joan Chittister
"People say, 'What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?' They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time. We can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fish."Dorothy Day
"In [Philip] Howard's view, our reliance on law, lawyers, and lawsuits has turned Americans into fat, neurotic cowards who 'go through the day looking over their shoulder instead of where they want to go.' "Dahlia Lithwich
"A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth."Thomas Merton
"To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. When we do it knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, destructively, it is a desecration."Wendell Berry
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