Richard Mentor Johnson Quotes

Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort on behalf of Evangelical Christians have generated little cultural gain.

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

Most of the forward movements of life in general ... have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

Why is the church always a taillight rather than a headlight?

A new world order is in the making, and it is up to us to prepare ourselves that we may take our rightful place in it.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple & enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it & hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do.

Each nation has a main current in life; in India it is religion. Make it strong and the waters on either side must move along with it. This is one phase of my line of thought. In time, I hope to bring them all out, but at present I find I have a mission in this country also. Moreover, I expect help in this country and from here alone. But up to date I could not do anything except spreading my ideas. Now I want that a similar attempt be made in India.

You are resisting, but you've come to see that tactically as well as morally, it is better to be nonviolent.If one would, didn't want to deal with the moral questions, it would just be impractical for the Negro to talk about making his struggle a violent one.

...it is prodigious the quantity of good that may be done by one man if he will make a business of it.

Each nation has a main current in life; in India it is religion. Make it strong and the waters on either side must move along with it.

The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.

I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything?... I'm not going to be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe. I don't even think about that. I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There's only man. And it's he who makes miracles.

We cannot be sure if we are loving God, although we may have good reasons for believing that we are, but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbor. And be certain that, the farther advanced you find you are in this, the greater the love you will have for God.

There's an older generation that feels like they know what the future should be. And then there's your generation that may have an idea of what the future should be, but that could evolve.

Words may inspire but only action creates change.

I've lived long enough to see the triumph of zealots and absolutists, to watch money swallow politics, to witness the rise of the corporate state. See the party of working and poor people become a sycophant of crony capitalism. Watch the union of church and state become fashionable again. Witness the coupling of news and entertainment. See everyday people cast overboard as the pirates and predators of Wall Street seized the ship of state. I didn't drift; I moved left just by standing still.

We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. - Manifesto of the Communist Party

Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion's social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act.

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

A too constant preoccupation with money may seem to indicate the lack of a proper sense of moral values, but [let] those who have always had money . . . be without it for a while, and they will soon discover how quickly it becomes their chief concern.