Church Quotes

"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

"It is sufficient to say, what everybody knows to be true, that the Irish population is Catholic, and that the Protestants, whether of the Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church, or of both united, are a small minority of the Irish people"

John Bright, Politician

"My training in Science of Mind had begun with my mother. She took me to a different church every Sunday, and she encouraged me to question the minister afterward"

Esther Williams, Actress

"One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always"

Aiden Wilson Tozer, Clergyman

"You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church"

Art Blakey, Musician

"My mom always said that if the Protestants catch a Catholic in their church, they feed them to the Jews"

Kate O'Brien, Novelist

"Hopefully when you see the movie, Maybe you don't have the Orlando in your life, but you know that guy. He goes to church. He's down the street. He's one of the boys at the schoolyard. They exist"

Shemar Moore, Actor

"My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it"

Muddy Waters, Musician

"You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice?"

Muddy Waters, Musician

"My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar"

Maureen Forrester, Musician

"Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church"

John McGahern, Writer

"And a third thing is the understanding of the Church as a community, a communion which is just a hierarchy but the people of God, whose servants are the priests and bishops"

Hans Kung, Theologian

"I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is associated in my memory with my mother"

Pierre Loti, Writer

"The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world"

Rowan D. Williams, Clergyman

"The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament"

Rowan D. Williams, Clergyman

"Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign"

Rowan D. Williams, Clergyman

"The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book"

John McGahern, Writer

"Even at church, people would not shake my hand"

Ryan White, Celebrity

"It is an absolutely unique success of the church community to have introduced such an epoch-making change, in just a few years, without having a serious division"

Hans Kung, Theologian

"The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution"

Joseph Ratzinger, Clergyman

"I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer"

John McGahern, Writer

"Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church"

Goldwin Smith, Historian

"When my children were born, I didn't have them baptized because I felt baptism was about erasing Original Sin - something the Church said children got from their mother - and I absolutely refused to believe women carry Original Sin"

Olympia Dukakis, Actress

"Well, to take me from where I was, and the life I was leading, to the life I lead now with the church and with the Lord and with Jesus Christ, it's a total, total turn-around"

Pat Summerall, Celebrity

"I have a lot of memories of Falls Church. I went to grade school in Madison Elementary School"

Jim Fowler, Scientist

"My mother raised me in the church. I was not allowed to stay home on Sunday; there was no option. I sang in the choir all the way up until I went to college"

Steve Harvey, Actor

"Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs"

Fred Allen, Comedian

"But I'll tell you what, there was a lot of farmland between Falls Church and Washington"

Jim Fowler, Scientist

"I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them"

Mark Haddon, Novelist

"He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic"

Kingsley Amis, Novelist

"I sang in church choir all my life, through elementary school, junior high and high school"

Kevin Richardson, Musician

"Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood"

Erica Jong, Novelist

"I sang on Church Street, every place that had a stage"

Ruth Brown, Musician

"Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting"

Francis Schaeffer, Theologian

"I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction"

Donald Johanson, Scientist

"Compared to America or Europe, God isn't a big part of our lives here. I don't know anyone here who goes to church when he's had a rough divorce or is going through depression. We go out into nature instead"

Bjork, Musician

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