Prophetic Voice Quotes

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

I am a prophet…I am a prophet … I am a prophet…

Christians got a lot of work to do. But, the spirit of Dorothy Day is alive. Martin Luther King is still alive. Malcolm X and the prophetic Islamic tradition is still alive. We can't lose sight of those prophetic religious folk who, even given their kin in the same tradition, says, you all are wrong on this, but we're still in the same tradition.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.

No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand.

Being prophets may sometimes imply making waves. I do not know how to put it.... Prophecy makes noise, uproar, some say ‘a mess.’ But in reality, the charisma of religious people is like yeast: prophecy announces the spirit of the Gospel.

I think that in a certain sense, we're concerned about the same issues. How do you accent the progressive, the prophetic, those things that are critical of all forms of injustice, all forms of bigotry, all forms of dehumanizing other people, and yet still allow for a certain kind of flow, linguistic flow, certain kinds of melodies and harmonies in the samplings that take place?

What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.

It has pleased God to place me head of the Reformed church in Scotland; I am a watchman...For that reason I am bound in conscience to blow the trumpet publicly.

People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people.

The preacher who jests and jokes with his people all week will soon find that he cannot stand in his pulpit on Sunday with power to reprove, rebuke and exhort. He may be the life of the party but it will be the death of the prophet.

American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO... Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.

Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.

When he (man) ceased any longer to heed the words of the seers and prophets, science lovingly brought forth the radio.

If God wanted me to be quiet he would’ve never showed me what he does.

Where are now the warriors of the world of the spirit? Where are those who raise their voices for truth, who lead us to goodness, beauty, strength and health? Where are those who utter heartwarming words, who will lead us out of the wilderness? Our homes are gone and the nation is destroyed, yet we have no Jeremiah crying out his last sad song to the world and to posterity.

I heard an angel speak last night/And he said, "Write!"

A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that?

And the Lord gave me [the name] “Sojourner” because I was to travel up an' down the land showin' the people their sins an' bein' a sign unto them. Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, cause everybody else had two names, an' the Lord gave me “Truth”, because I was to declare the truth to the people.

The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.