Church Quotes

"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

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

Fred Allen, Comedian

"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

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

Kevin Richardson, Musician

"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

"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

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives"

Robert A. Heinlein, Writer

"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

"The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity"

Matthew Henry, Clergyman

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

Joanna Southcott, Celebrity

"It is common for those that are farthest from God, to boast themselves most of their being near to the Church"

Matthew Henry, Clergyman

"We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides"

Saint Ignatius, Saint

"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

"The Church became both more accessible and less imposing. It threw itself open to risk"

Lance Morrow

"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 death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against"

Suzanne Fields

"Martin Luther King Jr. really understood the role of the churches when he said, 'The church is not meant to be the master of the state.' We don't sort of take power and grab the levers of government and impose our agenda down people's throats"

Jim Wallis, Writer

"The council now beginning rises in the Church like the daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light"

Pope John XXIII, Clergyman

"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

"The only place a new hat can be carried into with safety is a church, for there is plenty of room there"

Leigh Hunt, Poet

"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

"I'd like to do my first record I ever made, A Church, a Courtroom, and Then Goodbye"

Patsy Cline, Musician

"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

"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 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

"Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th"

Lance Morrow

"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 believe in the separation of church and state, absolutely. But I don't believe in the separation of public life from our values, our basic values, and for many of us, our religious values"

Jim Wallis, Writer

"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

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