Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

When you become a Christian, something truly amazing happens: God comes to live inside your heart. You become the home of God.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

Fidelity and allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those oaths.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

I know how to swim through backlash. I can tread water through backlash… If anything, that’s all giving me power.

Critics only make you stronger. You have to look at what they are saying as feedback. Sometimes the feedback helps, and other times, it’s just noise that can be a distraction.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.

That I am not a member of any Christian church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures, and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.

Do you know something? The minute that blood sacrifice was accepted, Jesus was the first human being that was ever born again. Now that was real – it happened when he was in Hell.

God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God’s children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God.

I can’t jump the highest. I’m obviously not the biggest, not the strongest.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

There is no austerity equal to a balanced mind, and there is no happiness equal to contentment; there is no disease like covetousness, and no virtue like mercy.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do.

Exercise is labor without weariness.

Sin, also for those who don’t have faith, exists when one goes against one’s conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

We come bulletproof in Ireland. We’re reared tough, and we fight.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

I add this, that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

Christ was God in human flesh, and He proved it by rising from the dead.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

I deal with more practical issues of the Bible.

You might say, ‚Can’t we have a more human Christianity, without the cross, without Jesus, without stripping ourselves?‘ In this way we’d become pastry-shop Christians, like a pretty cake and nice sweet things. Pretty, but not true Christians.

We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled.

When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.

International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.

If any of you should ask me for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say that it is in one word – prayer. Live and die without prayer, and you will pray long enough when you get to hell.

The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.

We may stumble and fall but shall rise again; it should be enough if we did not run away from the battle.

If you’d have said Evangelical in 1957, most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. And then, they’d be against it.

There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.

You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It’s very real. It’s very strong.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

My problem is I am Christian, so I think other people must have success, too; it’s not about me.

I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.