Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

The devil is a peace stealer, and he works hard to set us up to get upset. But we can learn how to change our approach so we don’t live upset all of the time. And Jesus gives us the best example to follow.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‚people.‘ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Jesus isn’t lettin‘ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily… When people say, you know, ‚Good teacher‘, ‚Prophet‘, ‚Really nice guy‘ … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music; I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

You can’t trust very many people.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Jesus is a divine guest inside of you all the time – one who loves, understands, sees and hears you. He wants to live in oneness with you… to be the centerpiece of everything you do.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They’re only powerful when you got your back turned.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Despite the slowness, the infidelity, the errors and sins it committed and might still commit against its members, the Church, trust me, has no other meaning and goal but to live and witness Jesus.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Jesus never mistreated anyone just because they mistreated Him. He confronted them in a spirit of gentleness and then continued to love them.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.