Quotes from Eric Metaxas

one's thoughts were regulated by the power of the state, how could one really be free?

It had been Luther's idea that Christians should confess to one another instead of to a priest. Most Lutherans had thrown that baby out with the bathwater and didn't confess to anyone. Confession of any kind was considered overly Catholic, just as extemporaneous prayer was criticized as too pietistic. But Bonhoeffer successfully instituted the practice of confessing one to another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that "the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." And George Bernard Shaw said, "If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change." Still

And of course, at the center of so much of it was Pitt, who was a startlingly different person when at ease among his friends.

Heydrich was dead. At the end of May, the albino stoat had been ambushed by Czech Resistance fighters while he was riding in his open-topped Mercedes. Eight days later, the architect of the Final Solution fell into the hands of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Wit and its employment as a weapon not only in political combat but in playing with one's friends was at the core of the Goostree's Gang.

They believed that in watching these burnings and dissections, they had an actual window into hell itself.

Bonhoeffer was simply saying that if we wished truly to live, we must be prepared to die. And this was not bad news at all, but rather was the very best of good news imaginable. In fact it is called the good news or the gospel, and it is simply that Jesus has purchased for us a passage to eternal life, something so outrageous and unbelievable that most people really don't believe it and therefore ignore it.

But we are today in very real danger of doing just that, of becoming America in name only.

Wilberforce was greatly renowned for his singing voice and came to be known as the "Nightingale of Commons"—probably not only for the remarkable quality of his voice but for the hours at which he sang.

To help them was tantamount to shaking one's fist at God. Raising their sights from the vulgar spectacle of things like public hangings could rock the boat of civil society and mustn't be attempted.

Thus," he said, "the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound.

It wouldn't be entirely clear to him until 1787, but in the meantime, as a first step in the right direction, Wilberforce championed two bills, both of which failed. One was for parliamentary reform and the other was a strange and ghoulish bill combining two macabre issues: putting an end to the burning of women at the stake, and selling the corpses of hanged criminals for dissection.

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition.

The idea that people of faith cling to God to avoid science has been replaced with the idea that atheists cling to their invented God-of-the-gaps idea to avoid the real God who created the universe that science is discovering, and whose existence is increasingly undeniable because of those very discoveries.

The term "noblesse oblige"—the idea that those who have been blessed with much are to use it to help those who have not been so blessed—would not be coined for another half-century, and Wilberforce had yet to discover the relevance of any such idea to his own life.

Hitler presented himself as a man of moderation and peace, as someone devoted to the German people, and as someone who publicly claimed to be following "God's will." He promised to lead Germany out of the economic hell into which it had fallen, and to lift the deep shame that Germans felt at having lost the First World War.

I thank God that I live in the age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and entertaining.

I fancy it must be this which, when I am with you, prevents me considering you an object of compassion, tho' Prime Minister of England; for now, when I am out of hearing of your foyning…I cannot help representing you to myself as oppressed with cares and troubles.

The date was appropriate for his debut, for it was—certainly unbeknownst to Wilberforce—the fiftieth birthday of George Washington, the man who had driven Lord North and King George to the brink of madness and frustration

It was as if the unassuming little fellow had all these months been concealing a blunderbuss beneath his coat, and now he rose and suddenly revealed it to the rotund North, who sat there aghast and goggle-eyed, fingering his slingshot.

Formerly they had been the bitterest foes, but behold, they were now united against their common enemies—common decency and common sense!

fussy, over-formalized way

But for the king the whole thing was worse than politically hideous and cynical; it was bitterly personal because of Fox's pernicious influence on the king's eldest son, the Prince of Wales.