Notable Quotes 1999
Notable Quotes 2000
Notable Quotes 2001
Notable Quotes 2002
Notable Quotes 2003
Notable Quotes 2004
Notable Quotes 2005
Notable Quotes 2006
Notable Quotes 2007
Notable Quotes 2008



	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
American evangelist



	"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
Theologian



	"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
op-ed column, "Safety Nets for the Rich." (New York Times)



	“We are defined as a nation by how we treat those who have chosen to hurt us.”		
Rev. Ian Galloway
commenting on the release of al-Megrahi



	"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
Scottish Minister who released al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds



	"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
blogging in God's Politics about the al-Megrahi release



	"'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
founder of the L'Arche movement



	"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
of the Washington Post



	"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
former President and torturer (2003)



	“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
in a speech on national security



	"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)
German rocket pioneer



	"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
in Slate.com



	"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
Salvadoran archbishop, assassinated in 1980



	"Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. 
	Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."   	
Holocaust Museum
Washington, D.C.



	"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
My Religion, 1927



	"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
19th century American civil rights activist



	"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
spiritual writer



	"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
American social activist and peace campaigner



	"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
Slate



	"A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy
	are the most powerful forces on earth."	
Thomas Merton
Passion for Peace



	"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
The Gift of Good Land


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