John Shelby Spong Quotes

As Americans, preserving the best of our traditions, we have the right- nay the duty-to fight for participation in the forward march of humanity

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

We don't have as much prejudice as we did 40 years ago, but today it is more educated.

Listen, you know this: If there's not a rebellious youth culture, there's no culture at all. It's absolutely essential. It is the future. This is what we're supposed to do as a species, is advance ideas.

I think more things are becoming socially acceptable. I think that just by having more media, whether that's TV or Internet, we're able to see more things.

A culture is not an abstract thing. It is a living, evolving process. The aim is to push beyond standard-setting and asserting human rights to make those standards a living reality for people everywhere.

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts.

Like the majority of Alaskans, I supported a constitutional amendment in 1998 defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, but my thinking has evolved as America has witnessed a clear cultural shift.

I'm amazed when I hear my daughters with their friends. They'll just talk openly about, 'Yeah, he used to be a girl and now he's a boy.' It gives me a lot of hope... It's so matters of fact. It's like they're saying blue and yellow make green. I love that.

My generation, we're so smart and opinionated, and we know the world we want to live in; we know the future we want. We're such a liberal, forward-thinking generation that's been held back by an older generation that doesn't understand it, doesn't want the world to progress quickly because of old ideologies.

The world is a little more diverse in 2015 than when the Fantastic Four comic first came out in 1961.

As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end.

Those cultural wars, Sexual Revolution issues are fading from the scene, and the coming generation has basically settled them.

We should not be followers of traditions that go against human rights...we are human beings and we make traditions.

In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress.

Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.

I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust... Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today. The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change.

Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize.

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.