Peter L. Berger Quotes

I had my breakthrough at 6 years old and received the Lord, Jesus Christ. I was so swept up in the spirit, I told my parents I had future plans to enter the priesthood.

Hillary Clinton's been talking about the inner cities for 25 years. Nothing's going to ever happen.

People say that it is so hard to bring Jesus Christ and present him before the lives of men today. Of course it is. It is so hard that it is impossible except by the power of the indwelling Holy Ghost.

Philadelphia caught my attention in 1995 when a group of homeless families were living in an abandoned cathedral. Even from the beginning they connected theology with what they were doing. They put a banner on the front of the cathedral that said, "How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday."

I would be a president for all of the people, African- Americans, the inner cities. Devastating what's happening to our inner cities. She's been talking about it for years. As usual, she talks about it, nothing happens. She doesn't get it done.

It is better to allow our lives to speak for us than our words. God did not bear the cross only two thousand years ago. He bears it today, and he dies and is resurrected from day to day. It would be a poor comfort to the world if it had to depend on a historical God who died two thousand years ago. Do not, then, preach the God of history, but show him as he lives today through you.

You can receive Christ into your heart, and he can bring joy, and a thrill, and glory such as you have never known - if you will give your life to him.

I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose - His purpose.

About the state of black America, I've been working on that for many, many years. And [Donald Trump] said certain things in his early days about wanting to do something about it. We have a lot of violence in our neighborhoods now. We need education. And we need jobs. Is what I'm trying to say.

Jesus will meet me today in the person of someone in need-I must not miss him.

Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.

We have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people. We have Hispanic-American people that are in the inner cities and they are living in hell.

We preach sermons, write books on apologetics, conduct city-wide evangelistic campaigns. For those alienated from the church, that approach no longer has the same drawing power. And for the truly needy, words alone don't satisfy; "A hungry person has no ears," as one relief worker told me. A skeptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live.

What I am trying to say is that Jesus who incarnated God 2,000 years ago is mystically present and waiting to be discovered in EVERY person you and I encounter

When I stand up to talk, people listen to me; they will follow what I have to say. Is it any power of mine? Of course not. St. Paul says, 'What have you that you have not received and you who have received, why do you glory as if you had not?' But the secret of my power is that I have never in fifty-five years missed spending an hour in the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That's where the power comes from. That's where sermons are born. That's where every good thought is conceived.

Get up every day, love God, and do your best. He will do the rest!

I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.

We have set out to promote the work of community and faith-based charities. Government cannot be replaced by charities, but it can welcome them as partners instead of resenting them as rivals.

Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.

Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not "follow the footsteps of his most holy life" by the exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm, rough earth, up hill and down dale.

God inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds - deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.

Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable moments. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but...at supper time, or walking along a road...He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.

Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.

Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.

I can tell you about Hillary Clinton's heart. This is a woman, who, after law school, went down to my native South. She went down, after graduating from Yale Law School, to help poor kids, to help disabled kids.