Reformation Quotes

To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

[Martin] Luther was guilty of two great crimes. He struck the Pope in his crown and the monks in their bellies.

I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scripture, than he does.

The truth is that we are all Hussites

For political and intellectual freedom and for all the blessings that political and intellectual freedom have brought in their train, she [England] is chiefly indebted to the great rebellion of the laity against the priesthood.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he'd taken a poll in Israel? Where would the Reformation have gone if Martin Luther had taken a poll?

Luther and the Reformation were of fundamental importance to Denmark. We Danes are still Lutherans today. We spoke about him a lot in school, and we feel very close to him.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

There is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Every day I'm thinking about change.

Change will always be violent.

Prison matures you.

There never was, perhaps, before seen such a body of pious people together on the face of the earth. For those who came over first, came for the sake of religion, and for that pure religion which was entirely hated by the loose and profane world. Their civil and ecclesiastical leaders were exemplary patterns of piety. They encouraged only the virtuous to come with, and follow them

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is in no way worn out or impaired… The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is more adverse to all implicit of mind or opinion. Worship in our Northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

Calvin was virtually the founder of America.

I will be a model prisoner, as I have been a model citizen.