Priests Quotes - Page 26

• Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

  John Updike

  Sex, Black, Age

  John Updike (1981). “Rabbit is Rich: Rabbit Redux ; Rabbit, Run”

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• Indians, of course, have no "theology," and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

  Sinclair Lewis

  White, Excuse, Theology

  "The God-Seeker". Book by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 41, 1949.

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• Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." The adage is true as long as you don't really believe the words. But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than deeds.

  Richard Dawkins

  Teacher, Hurt, Husband

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• We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race.

  James Joyce

  Race, Ends, Chapters

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• Youth means love, Vows can't change nature, priests are only men.

  Robert Browning

  Mean, Men, Youth

  'The Ring and the Book' (1868-9) bk. 1, l. 1056

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• In the [first] fifteen years [of field work] I can remember just ten times when I had really narrow escapes from death. Two were from drowning in typhoons, one was when our boat was charged by a wounded whale; once my wife and I were nearly eaten by wild dogs, once we were in great danger from fanatical lama priests; two were close calls when I fell over cliffs, once I was nearly caught by a huge python, and twice I might have been killed by bandits.

  Roy Chapman Andrews

  Dog, Years, Whales

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• New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.

  John Milton

  'On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament' (1646)

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• No man can hinder our private addresses to God; every man can build a chapel in his breast, himself the priest, his heart the sacrifice, and the earth he treads on, the altar.

  Jeremy Taylor

  Prayer, Heart, Sacrifice

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• The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?

  John Adams

  Kings, Race, Faith Religion

  John Adams, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson (1971). “The Adams-Jefferson letters: the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams”, Touchstone

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• God created sex. Priests created marriage.

  Voltaire

  Funny, Marriage, Sexy

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• The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests.

  Sam Harris

  Men, Religion, Bishops

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.84, W. W. Norton & Company

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• For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

  Graham Greene

  Success, Thinking, Artist

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• Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

  Graham Greene

  Long, Cases, Ifs

  Graham Greene (2000). “The Honorary Consul: A Novel”, p.139, Simon and Schuster

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• In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government.

  David Hume

  Ambition, Thinking, Government

  David Hume (2016). “Essays Moral, Political, Literary: Revision of Great Book”, p.50, VM eBooks

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• In Mexico the gods ruled, the priests interpreted and interposed, and the people obeyed.In Spain, the priests ruled, the king interpreted and interposed, and the gods obeyed. A nuance in an ideological difference is a wide chasm.

  Richard Condon

  Kings, Differences, People

  1961 A Talent for Loving, bk.1, ch.6.

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• How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

  Edmund White

  Book, Past, Sick

  "A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, 1982.

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• We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

  Tanith Lee

  Art, Needs, Tribes

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• The Episcopalians don't demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages? it's much like the New York Times editorial board. They acknowledge the Ten Commandments? or "Moses' talking points"? but hasten to add that they're not exactly "carved in stone."

  Ann Coulter

  Girl, Religious, New York

  Ann Coulter (2004). “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter”, p.105, Crown Forum

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• If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.

  Hans Kung

  Jesus, Father, Fighting

  Newsweek interview, July 08, 1991.

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• Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the "clear heart" of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Heart, Moon, Light

  "Japan, the Beautiful and Myself". Yasunari Kawabata's Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 12, 1968.

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• Santa Claus is a god. He's no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn't ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stories. And don't gods reflect their creators' society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?

  Donald E. Westlake

  Prayer, War, Animal

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• I'd got accepted to the seminary in Wisconsin, and I was gonna become a priest, but the last second I thought, 'I'll just go to public school.' I had just gotten a new amplifier in my bedroom, and I didn't think I was allowed to take it with me.

  Jack White

  School, Thinking, Lasts

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• Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Numbers, Doctors, Anxiety

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• When the parish priest rebuked him for his celibacy, saying it would lead him into debaucheryand sin, hesaid that a man who had to be muzzled bya wife as a protection against debauchery was not worthy of the joy of innocence. After that people began to treat him with priestly respect.

  Liam O'Flaherty

  Men, People, Wife

  'The Mermaid'.

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• [Ireland is a] country peopled by peasants, priests and pixies.

  Robert Kilroy-Silk

  Country, Pixies, Peasants

  The Daily Express, November 09, 2002.

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