Church Quotes

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church"

"I believe there is no doctrine more dangerous to the Church today than to convey the impression that a revival is something peculiar in itself and cannot be judged by the same rules of causes and effect as other things"

Billy Sunday, Clergyman

"Christianity means a lot more than church membership"

Billy Sunday, Clergyman

"A revival does two things. First, it returns the Church from her backsliding and second, it causes the conversion of men and women; and it always includes the conviction of sin on the part of the Church. What a spell the devil seems to cast over the Church today!"

Billy Sunday, Clergyman

"Hypocrites in the Church? Yes, and in the lodge and at the home. Don't hunt through the Church for a hypocrite. Go home and look in the mirror. Hypocrites? Yes. See that you make the number one less"

Billy Sunday, Clergyman

"Unless you have made a complete surrender and are doing his will it will avail you nothing if you've reformed a thousand times and have your name on fifty church records"

Billy Sunday, Clergyman

"When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It's like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body"

Bill Lee, Athlete

"God Almighty never intended that the devil should triumph over the Church. He never intended that the saloons should walk rough-shod over Christianity"

Billy Sunday, Clergyman

"My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead"

Barack Obama, President

"I take the kids to church and Sunday school. They love it. I really think it's important for a child to feel that there are things that are bigger than your life out there"

Reese Witherspoon, Actress

"Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate"

Ulysses S. Grant, President

"If you were to look back at me as a school kid you'd see a very quiet little church mouse kind of character"

Johnny Rotten, Musician

"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it"

Simon Wiesenthal, Activist

"The teachings of the Church line up more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party"

James Carville, Lawyer

"We thought the church had withdrawn from interfering in Italian politics... but instead there is a terrible resurgence. These are ugly signs for freedom of expression"

Dario Fo, Playwright

"And I definitely wanted to be a writer, but I felt a duty now, having used up those educational resources, I felt a duty to the church and my parents to become a priest"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"Every day Catholics prove that you can be a good Catholic and a good Democrat and have a different position from the Church on abortion"

James Carville, Lawyer

"Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church"

John Templeton, Businessman

"And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s"

Thomas Keneally, Novelist

"I think the Church is a conduit to God. The Church is not God. And I think that from the very beginning Jesus taught us that"

Martin Sheen, Actor

"Depressions may bring people closer to the church but so do funerals"

Clarence Darrow, Lawyer

"Well, I think that Catholicism's basic foundation of faith is personal conscience. I think it's between you and God, not you and the Church"

Martin Sheen, Actor

"It doesn't really matter how much of the rules or the dogma we accepted and lived by if we're not really living by the fundamental creed of the Catholic Church, which is service to others and finding God in ourselves and then seeing God in everyone - including our enemies"

Martin Sheen, Actor

"Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister"

Herman Melville, Novelist

"People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy"

Mikhail Bakunin, Revolutionary

"At the end of 1795 and beginning of 1796, I was ordered to write to the Church ministers"

Joanna Southcott, Celebrity

"The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's inner maturity; it is the expression of his personal dignity"

Pope John Paul II, Clergyman

"The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message"

Pope John Paul II, Clergyman

"Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family - a domestic church"

Pope John Paul II, Clergyman

"The duty of the Church is not only to teach the ignorant, but to correct the erring, and to punish, according to their deserts, those who sin presumptuously"

Pope Gregory IX, Pope

"The church must be a place of mercy freely given, where everyone can feel welcomed, loved, forgiven and encouraged to live the good life of the Gospel"

Pope Francis, Pope

"Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church"

Joseph Ratzinger, Clergyman

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards"

Joseph Ratzinger, Clergyman

"I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people"

Roger Nash Baldwin, Activist

"The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place"

Julian Bond, Activist

"I was brought up as a Catholic and went to church every week and took the sacraments. It never really touched the core of my being"

Sting, Musician

"I remember very much there in Falls Church there was a creek that was flowing down into 4 Mile Run. I believe it's now covered up where it goes under Columbia Street. I found a whole family of weasels down there"

Jim Fowler, Scientist

"I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it"

Don DeLillo, Novelist

"And you know, we'd go to church. We were Baptists. And every now and then there'd be a tent would set up, and it was the Holiness folks. And we liked their music"

Mel Tillis, Musician

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