A Cherokee elder sitting with his grandchildren told them, "In every life there is a terrible fight - a fight between two wolves. One is evil: he is fear, anger, envy, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, and deceit. The other is good: joy, serenity, humility, confidence, generosity, truth, gentleness, and compassion." A child asked, "Grandfather, which wolf will win?" The elder looked him in the eye. "The one you feed."
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws; it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his fellow man. -- Leo Tolstoy
Without the knowledge of our wretchedness, the knowledge of God creates pride. With it, the knowledge of God creates despair. The knowledge of Christ offers a third way, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness. -- Blaise Pascal
If we could read
the secret history of our enemies,
we would find in each person's life
sorrow and suffering enough
to disarm all hostility.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How can you say, I have fulfilled the law and prophets, since it is written in the law: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself? Look, many of your brothers, sons of Abraham, are covered with filth and dying of hunger while your house is filled with many goods and not a thing goes out of it to them. -- Origen
Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made the healer of it. -- Alan Paton
It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, "Let justice roll down like mighty waters," and quite another to work out the irrigation system. Clearly there is more certainty in the recognition of wrongs than there is in the prescription for their cure. -- William Sloane Coffin
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity; here is the true Christian definition of freedom. Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others! -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
