Michael O'Brien > Michael's Quotes

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”
― John W. Campbell Jr.

“If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You don’t need scores of suitors. You need only one… if he’s the right one.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Have you no wish for others to be saved? Then you're not saved yourself, be sure of that!”
― Charles Spurgeon

“A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“TRUTH – It’s the New Hate Speech: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” – George Orwell”
― George Orwell

“Today, even amongst Christians, there can be found much of that spirit that wants to give as little as possible to the Lord, and yet to get as much as possible from Him. The prevailing thought today is of being used, as though that were the one thing that mattered. That my little rubber band should be stretched to the very limit seems all important. But this is not the Lord's mind. The Lord wants us to be used, yes; but what He is after is that we pour all we have, ourselves, to Him, and if that be all, that is enough.”
― Watchman Nee

“Many Christians have what we might call a "cultural holiness". They adapt to the character and behavior pattern of Christians around them. As the Christian culture around them is more or less holy, so these Christians are more or less holy. But God has not called us to be like those around us. He has called us to be like himself. Holiness is nothing less than conformity to the character of God.”
― Jerry Bridges

“We are called to proclaim His great Salvation and rescue the captives…. But we are busy spending 33 billion a year in diet products for ourselves or for our over weight cats. We are busy redecorating our temporal housing, We are spending every evening for our own pleasure, and every spare dollar for our won retirement. And somehow the unreached in their life and death eternal struggle slip our minds and concern… we never get around to being serious about Jesus and his command to take the good news to them.”
― John Willis Zumwalt, Passion for the Heart of God

“I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth "home." Before you know it, I am calling luxeries "needs" and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set.”
― John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.”
― Charles J. Chaput

“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”
― Leonard Ravenhill

“What God says is best, is best, though all the men in the world are against it.”
― John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

“There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.”
― Robert Frost

“It is not scientific doubt, not atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and in this land is likely to quench the light of the Gospel. It is a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church-going, hollow-hearted prosperity”
― Frederic D. Huntington

“It appears that too many Christians want to enjoy the thrill of feeling right but are not willing to endure the inconvenience of being right.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous

“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”
― Milton Friedman

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”
― Milton Friedman

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
― Milton Friedman

“If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.”
― C.S. Lewis

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Classics are books everyone knows but no has read.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If one black man, aided by a bevy of good, decent, dedicated, open-, and liberal-minded whites and Jews can succeed in prevailing over a group of white racists by making them look like the ignorant fools they truly are, then imagine what a nation of like-minded individuals can accomplish.”
― Ron Stallworth, Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime