Pulpit Quotes - Page 6

• It's remarkable to watch the president, with all the weight of his ability to command rhetoric with the bully pulpit behind him, make a clear speech about climate change and why that's so important for us all to focus on. And that is a rather remarkable thing to see. It's enormously powerful.

  Josh Fox

  Powerful, Focus, Bully

  "Gasland Part II": The Fracking Empire Strikes Back". Interview with Brett Brownell, www.motherjones.com. July 8, 2013.

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• Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor's chair.

  Alice Dunbar Nelson

  Fashion, Ideas, Innovation

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• Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.

  Peter Kreeft

  Christian, Buddhism, Miracle

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• Henry Ward Beecher, so the story goes, was once asked by a young preacher how he could keep his congregation wide awake and attentive during his sermons. Beecher replied that he always had a man watch for sleepers, with instructions, as soon as he saw anyone start nodding or dozing, to hasten to the pulpit and wake up the preacher. Aren't you and I usually less sensible? Would we not be inclined to have the watcher wake up not ourselves but the fellows caught sleeping? In other words, aren't we disposed always to blame others?

  B. C. Forbes

  Sleep, Men, Watches

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• Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Addresses

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.105, Xist Publishing

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• Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Worshippers

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.119, Harvard University Press

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• In the pulpit, were supposed to present the teaching with all of its unvarnished clarity, but when you step out of the pulpit, you have to meet people where they are and try to walk with them.

  Donald Wuerl

  Teaching, People, Trying

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• There is something in the eloquence of the pulpit, when it is really eloquence, which is entitled to the highest praise and honour. The preacher who can touch and affect such an heterogeneous mass of hearers, on subjects limited, and long worn thread-bare in all common hands; who can say any thing new or striking, any thing that rouses the attention, without offending the taste, or wearing out the feelings of his hearers, is a man whom one could not (in his public capacity) honour enough.

  Jane Austen

  Men, Hands, Offending

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• Nobody in pulpit or pew needs a revival more than a bitter-spirited fundamentalist with his dispensations right and his disposition wrong.

  Vance Havner

  Needs, Bitter, Revival

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• Let the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty... Let us hear the dignity of his [man's] nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God... Let it be known, that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments.

  John Adams

  Religious, Men, Liberty

  "The Works of John Adams, Volume 3: Autobiography, Diary, Notes of a Debate in the Senate, Essays". Book edited by Charles Francis Adams, 1851.

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• The most important Christian Education institution is not the pulpit or the school, important as those institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work.

  John Gresham Machen

  Family, Christian, School

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• Partisanship should be kept out of the pulpit... The blindest of partisans are preachers. All politicians expect and find more candor, fairness, and truth in politicians than in partisan preachers. They are not replied to - no chance to reply to them.... The balance wheel of free institutions is free discussion. The pulpit allows no free discussion.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Religion, Balance, Wheels

  "Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes". Book by Rutherford B. Hayes, 1922 - 1926.

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• 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.

  Vance Havner

  Christian, Party, Sunday

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• Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.

  Edmund Burke

  Christian, Character, Healing

  Edmund Burke (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Edmund Burke (Illustrated)”, p.1388, Delphi Classics

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• I know the problem of obesity. I got to tell you, I think that's tepid. I just don't think the bully pulpit is going to be enough to sufficiently fight obesity. We're going to have to have incentives in here.

  Max Baucus

  Fighting, Thinking, Bully

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• No rage is equal to the rage of a contented right-thinking man when he is confronted in the marketplace by an idea which belongs in the pulpit.

  Thurman Arnold

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

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• If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.

  C. S. Lewis

  Selfish, People, Feelings

  C. S. LEWIS (1961). “The Screwtape Letters & Screwtape Proposes a Toast”

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• You may drive a dog off the King's armchair, and it will climb into the preacher's pulpit; he views the world unmoved, unembarrassed, unabashed.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Dog, Kings, Views

  "Of Personal Merit". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

  Aldous Huxley

  Oratory, Matter, Politician

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• Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation...15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.

  Jack Dorsey

  Inspirational, Reading, Years

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• I do not know what we should do without the pulpit. We could better spare the sun-the moon, anyway.

  Mark Twain

  Moon, Religion, Sun

  Mark Twain (2016). “Mark Twain in Eruption (Abridged, Annotated)”, p.61, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.

  John Ruskin

  Inspirational, Life, Wise

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• The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.

  Charles Eliot Norton

  Courage, Freedom, Fall

  Charles Eliot Norton (1913). “Letters of Charles Eliot Norton”

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• Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

  John Ruskin

  Voice, Speech, Graves

  John Ruskin (1871). “Selections from the Writings of John Ruskin”, p.370

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• The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.

  Mark Twain

  Optimistic, Race, Talking

  Mark Twain, Charles Neider (1987). “The outrageous Mark Twain: some lesser-known but extraordinary works : with "Reflections on religion" now in book form for the first time”, Doubleday Books

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