Tony Campolo Quotes

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

People ask me a question, I'll give them my opinion. I never claimed to have all the answers.

I'd make a bad preacher.

I have come to one conclusion: All that I am, all that I aspire to be, all that I was before, is by the grace of God. There are so many women in Africa, and outside Africa, who are more intelligent than I am.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

I fear that many a man's good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

Therefore, the church is not absolutely necessary as an object of faith, not even for us today, for then Abraham and the other prophets would not have given assent to those things which were revealed to them from God without any intervening help of the church.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

There are any number of people who profess to be good Christian people who are willing to believe all kinds of things on suspicion. Now that is not the way the Bible directs for Christian people to do.

Hypocrites in the Church? Yes, and in the lodge and at the home. Don't hunt through the Church for a hypocrite. Go home and look in the mirror. Hypocrites? Yes. See that you make the number one less.

The truth won't set us free - until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.

Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas.

Looking back, I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in.

The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.

Either you look back and deal with your hypocrisy, or you dismiss it.

There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don't do what I say.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

I am not 'in pursuit of truth.' It is not my 'quarry.' I am of my human nature a thinker, and conscious of need, responsibility of thinking-speaking with truth. I do not go about hunting 'truths.'

And so it's inescapable and people who proclaim scrupulous honesty can only proclaim that if they don't examine closely the things they believe.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously, and I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.