Kevin Stilley

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Legalism – select quotes

The good news is that Christ frees us from the need to obnoxiously focus on our goodness, our commitment, and our correctness. Religion has made us obsessive almost beyond endurance. Jesus invited us to a dance… and we’ve turned it into a march of soldiers, always checking to see if we’re doing it right and are in step and in line with the other soldiers.
~ Steve Brown, in A Scandalous Freedom

One of the most serious problems facing the orthodox Christian church today is the problem of legalism. One of the most serious problems facing the church in Paul’s day was the problem of legalism. In every day it is the same. Legalism wrenches the joy of the Lord from the Christian believer, and with the joy of the Lord goes his power for vital worship and vibrant service. Nothing is left but cramped, sober, dull, and listless profession. The truth is betrayed, and the glorious name of the Lord becomes a synonym for a gloomy kill-joy. The Christian under law is a miserable parody of the real thing.
~ S. Lewis Johnson, from the article “The Paralysis of Legalism”

If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.
~ Eugene Peterson

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Plato – select quotes

A woman is only a lesser man.
~ Plato, in The Republic, bk. 5, 455e

Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one city of the poor, the other of the rich; they are at war with one another, and in either they are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treat them as a single state.
~ Plato, in The Republic, Bk. 4, 423.

Every man has had kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks, among his ancestors.
~ Plato, in Theaetetus, 155

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust.
~ Plato, in The Laws, Bk. 1, 636

Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victim of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
~ Socrates, in Plato’s The Republic, Bk. 1, 334c.

Shall we carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we shall wish them to have when they are grown up?
~ Socrates, in Plato’s Republic

The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.
~ Socrates, in Plato’s Apology

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.

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All European philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

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Marcus Tullius Cicero – select quotes

Marcus Tullius Cicero

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Of all the gifts of the gods to the human race, philosophy is the richest, the most beautiful, the most exalted.
~ in De Legibus

Philosophy is the best medicine for the mind.

History, the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity, committed to immortality.
~ in De Oratore [Read more…]

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Government – Select Quotes

Government Quotes

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The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867

In its reality, the state is always organized selfishness.
~ Emil Brunner, in The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947) page 460

What can be more noble than the government of the state by virtue? For then the man who rules others is not himself a slave to any passion, but has already acquired for himself all those qualities to which he is training and summoning his fellows. such a man imposes no laws upon th epopple that he does not obey himself, but puts his own life before his fellow-citizens as their law.
~ Cicero, in Republic

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
~ Gerald R. Ford, in Time magazine November 8, 1976

[Read more…]

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