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“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” —Thomas Merton
“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” —Tertullian
“Those “Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain only a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you condemn the gifts of God, and fight with His laws? What is a curse you seek as though it were a blessing. Do you make the anteroom of slaughter? Do you teach the women who are given to you for a procreation of offspring to perpetuate killing?” —St. John Chrysostom “You see how drunkenness leads to whoredom, whoredom to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevent its being born. Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?” —St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, XXIV “Some virgins [unmarried women] go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use abortifacients commit homicidedrugs to procure abortion, and when (as often happens) they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder.” —St. Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, 22:13 “The rich women, to avoid dividing the inheritance among many, kill their own unborn in the womb and with lethal extracts terminate their own offspring while yet in the womb.” —St. Clement of AlexandriaAmbrose, On the Hexaemeron
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“The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.” —Bill Watterson
“The future is not what it once was.” —Yogi Berra
“I keep six honest serving-men
“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” —Albert Einstein
“People will never come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” —Aldous Huxley
“When two men [in business] always agree, one of them is unnecessary.” —William Wrigley Jr., The American Magazine, 1931
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” —Friedrich Hegel
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” —Heinrich Heine
“So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind – it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact – I can only submit to the edict of others.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.” —G. K. Chesterton
“Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” —William Wilberforce
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” —Thomas Jefferson
“You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life. We will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.” —Dame Cicely Saunders (1918-2005), founder of the Hospice Palliative Care movement
“Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect - Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-- We murder to dissect.” —William Wordsworth
“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” —Marcus Aurelius
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else. It is about your outlook towards life. You can either regret or rejoice.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.” —Fred Astaire
“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” —Edward Snowden
“The holocaust has to be thought as a chapter in the long history of man's inhumanity to man. One cannot ignore the discrimination inflicted on many people because of race, color, or creed. One cannot ignore slavery. One cannot ignore the burning of witches. One cannot ignore the killing of Christians in the Roman period. The holocaust perhaps is the culmination of the kind of horror that can occur when man loses his integrity, his belief in the sanctity of human life.” —Dr. Randolph Braham, Holocaust Survivor
“Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.” —William Blake
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” —Thomas Merton
“Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.” —Frank A. Clark
“I teach them all the good I can, and recommend them to others from whom I think they will get some moral benefit. And the treasures that the wise men of old have left us in their writings I open and explore with my friends. If we come on any good thing, we extract it, and we set much store on being useful to one another.” —Socrates
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.” —T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
“What a lot of things there are a man can do without.” —Socrates
“I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.” —Descartes
“…a…transparent mind, …in no way implies clear thinking.” —Columbo (1971)
“If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself you should say: ‘He obviously doesn't know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned.’” —Epictetus
“Faithful copies of a counterfeit original yield only more counterfeits.” —unknown
“To trust God in the light is nothing, but to trust Him in the dark – that is faith.” —Charles Spurgeon
“Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.” —Abraham Joshua Heschel
“All the teachers of the Church, and all the Councils, and all the Divine Scriptures advise us to flee from the heterodox and separate from their communion.” —St. Mark of Ephesus
“‘But if,’ they say, ‘we had devised some middle ground between the dogmas (of the Papists and the Orthodox), then thanks to this we would have united with them and accomplished our business superbly, without at all having been forced to say anything except what corresponds to custom and has been handed down (by the Fathers).’ This is precisely the means by which many, from of old, have been deceived and persuaded to follow those who have led them off the steep precipice of impiety; believing that there is some middle ground between the two teachings that can reconcile obvious contradictions, they have been exposed to peril.” —St. Mark of Ephesus, Encyclical Letter, Orthodox Word, March-April-May, 1967
“Whoever preserves himself from them (the Latins) and keeps his faith pure will stand rejoicing at the right hand of God, but whoever willfully draws close to them will stand weeping bitterly with them on the left. For there is no eternal life for those living in the faith of the Latins or the Saracens…
If someone says to you: ‘Both your and our faith are from God’, you child, must reply to him as follows: ‘Who are you, you heretic? Do you think that God has two faiths? Have you not heard, accursed and perverted as you are by an evil faith that which is written: Thus saith the Lord: one Lord, one faith, one baptism…’
Thus they of evil faith, after holding to the Orthodox faith for so many years, have turned away to an evil faith and to Satan's teaching…
They have renounced the preaching of the apostles and the edification of the holy fathers, and have accepted a faith based on error and a perverted dogma leading to perdition. Therefore, they have been torn away from us and set apart…” —St. Theodosius of Kiev, 11th century
“That only the canonical Scriptures have infallibility is testified by Blessed Augustine in the words which he writes to Jerome: ‘It is fitting to bestow such honour and veneration only to the books of Scripture which are called 'canonical,' for I absolutely believe that none of the authors who wrote them erred in anything. … As for other writings, no matter how great was the excellence of their authors in sanctity and learning, in reading them I do not accept their teaching as true solely on the basis that they thus wrote and thought.’ Then, in a letter to Fortunatus [St. Mark continues in his citations of Augustine] he writes the following: ‘We should not hold the judgment of a man, even though this man might have been orthodox and had an high reputation, as the same kind of authority as the canonical Scriptures, to the extent of considering it inadmissible for us, out of the reverence we owe such men, to disapprove and reject something in their writing if we should happen to discover that they taught other than the truth which, with God's help, has been attained by others or by ourselves. This is how I am with regard to the writings of other men; and I desire that the reader will act thus with regard to my writings also.’” —St. Mark of Ephesus, Second Homily on Purgatorial Fire, chs. 15-16; Pogodin, pp. 127-132
“The Ecumenism is a huge lie; they speak in the name of a love outside of Christ, which excludes you from the Truth. If the Ecumenists really loved the world, they would not disown the truth of the value and the spiritual richness of Church Tradition and of the Holy Fathers. They disown Christianity from the gracious beauty. God has left from them, what remains is only their ego. No, we don’t need You. We lead the world, we rule the world, we give the bread, we give the happiness on this earth. Jesus must be arrested again not to disturb our march. Eliminating God from the world and of the soul in any way – this is the goal of the Ecumenism also repelled by Saint Justin Popovich. The Ecumenism and the globalization are at the forefront of the apocalyptic times. They want to accustom the eye and the spirit of the Orthodox with the habit to serve together with these heretics, until they get to have Communion from the same chalice. Because this could give them the right to build their own churches. But no, they want strategically to compromise the shrines and the faint hearted priests who are quick to “obedience”. The Ecumenists have the false impression that they will bring something new in the Church of Christ. Let us not forget that the Church is the body whose head is Christ. You can not break it from Christ Who is the Path, the Truth and the Life. The Ecumenists will not fulfill anything. You can not change the reality according to the human interests. The divine reality remains the same in every age. The Holy Spirit speaks through the mouths of the bearers of God, not of the bearers of human interests. The Christian Church has never gone after the crowd; not the many lead or hold the truth, but the few, chosen, as the carriers of the Holy Spirit. We do work only under this Father’s truth, the Gospel of our Lord and the Orthodox Church Tradition. All this falsehood which has appeared in our world has no other purpose than to embarrass and undermine the whole tradition and the beliefs of a nation. Questions are not posed and answers are not given, and people take for granted everything that has been written at the official level. But, by not solving these dogmatic problems the untruth slowly settles in our Orthodox Christian Church. All the Ecumenical attempts of unifying the other Christian communities found in heresy, the dialogues which have developed in our Orthodox Christian Church, since I know, haven’t got any result because they have false basis, they are untrue and do nothing but disturb the authentic Christian life.” —Elder Justin (Pârvu) of Romania, Din învățăturile și minunile Părintelui Justin
“Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense ‘Catholic,’ which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors.” —St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory, For the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith Against the Profane Novelties of All Heresies., Chapter II (circa 434 AD)
“The candles lit before icons of saints reflect their ardent love for God for Whose sake they gave up everything that man prizes in life, including their very lives, as did the holy apostles, martyrs and others. These candles also mean that these saints are lamps burning for us and providing light for us by their own saintly living, their virtues and their ardent intercession for us before God through their constant prayers by day and night. The burning candles also stand for our ardent zeal and the sincere sacrifice we make out of reverence and gratitude to them for their solicitude on our behalf before God.” —St. John of Kronstadt
“People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.” —unknown
“No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.” —unknown
“If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.” —Marvin J. Ashton
“My joy, I beg you, acquire the Spirit of Peace. That means to bring oneself to such a state that our spirit will not be disturbed by anything. For one must go through many sorrows to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the way all righteous men were saved and inherited the Heavenly Kingdom…” —St. Seraphim of Sarov
“My will, therefore, He took to Himself, my grief. In confidence I call it grief, because I preach His Cross. Mine is the will which He called His Own, for as Man He bore my grief, as Man He spake, and therefore said, ‘Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’ Mine was the grief, and mine the heaviness with which He bore it, for no man exults when at the point to die. With me and for me He Suffers, for me He is sad, for me He is heavy. In my stead therefore, and in me He grieved Who had no cause to grieve for Himself.
Not Thy Wound, but mine, hurt Thee, Lord Jesus; not Thy Death, but our weakness, even as the Prophet saith: ‘For He is afflicted for our sakes’--and we, Lord, esteemed Thee afflicted, when Thou grievedst not for Thyself, but for me.
And what wonder if He grieved for all, Who wept for one? What wonder if, in the hour of death, He is heavy for all, Who wept when at the point to raise Lazarus from the dead? Then, indeed, He was moved by a loving sister's tears, for they touched His human heart,--here by secret grief He brought it to pass that, even as His Death made an end of death, and His Stripes healed our scars, so also His Sorrow took away our sorrow.” —St. Ambrose of Milan, (+397), Ch. 7, Book II, Exposition on the Christian Faith
“Peace is not absence of struggle, but absence of uncertainty and confusion.” —Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
“I saw that there was no tragedy in God. Tragedy is to be found solely in the fortunes of the man whose gaze has not gone beyond the confines of this earth.” —Archimandrite Sophrony
“The Christian world nowadays presents a terrifying and cheerless picture of profound religious and moral decay. The servants of Antichrist do their utmost to completely displace God from people’s lives, in order that mankind, content with its material well-being, would not feel any need to turn to God in prayer, would not think of God at all, but would live as though God did not exist. Thus the entire structure of contemporary life in the so-called ‘free’ world, where there is no open and bloody persecution of faith, where everyone has the right to believe as he wishes, represents a far greater danger to a Christian’s soul by drawing the Christian wholly down to earth and making him forget heaven.
The entire modern culture, which is aimed at purely worldly achievements, and the resultant whirlwind of everyday life, keep a person in such a state of constant bustle and absent-mindedness that he has no opportunity for any soul-searching, and spiritual life within him gradually becomes extinguished.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse
“In advising against being carried away by artificial practices such as Transcendental Meditation I am but repeating the age-old message of the Church … The way of the Fathers requires firm faith and long patience, whereas our contemporaries want to seize every spiritual gift, including even direct contemplation of the Absolute God, by force and speedily, and will often draw a parallel between prayer in the Name of Jesus and yoga or Transcendental Meditation and the like. I must stress the danger of such errors … He is deluded who endeavors to divest himself mentally of all that is transitory and relative in order to cross some invisible threshold, to realize his eternal origin, his identity with the Source of all that exists, in order to return and merge with him, the nameless transpersonal Absolute. Such exercises have enabled many to rise to suprarational contemplation of being, to experience a certain mystical trepidation, to know the state of silence of mind, when mind goes beyond the boundaries of time and space. In such like states man may feel the peacefulness of being withdrawn from the continually changing phenomena of the visible world, may even have a certain experience of eternity. But the God of Truth, the Living God, is not in all this.
It is man’s own beauty, created in the image of God, that is contemplated and seen as divinity, whereas he himself still continues within the confines of his creatureliness. This is a vastly important concern. The tragedy of the matter lies in the fact that man sees a mirage which, in his longing for eternal life, he mistakes for a genuine oasis. This impersonal form of ascetics leads finally to an assertion of the divine principle in the very nature of man. Man is then drawn to the idea of self-deification—the cause of the original Fall. The man who is blinded by the imaginary majesty of what he contemplates has in fact set his foot on the path to self-destruction. He has discarded the revelation of a personal God … The movement into the depths of his own being is nothing else but attraction towards the non-being from which we were called by the will of the Creator.” —Archimandrite Sophrony of Mount Mt. Athos, His Life is Mine, 115-116
“Christ said, 'I came not to send peace, but a sword' and 'division'. Christ summoned us to war on the plane of the spirit, and our weapon is 'the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.' Our battle is waged in extraordinarily unequal conditions. We are tied hand and foot. We dare not strike with fire or sword: our sole armament is love, even for enemies. This unique war in which we are engaged is indeed a holy war. We wrestle with the last and only enemy of mankind death. Our fight is the fight for universal resurrection.” —Archimandrite Sophrony of Mount Mt. Athos, His Life is Mine
“I ask you to try something. If someone grieves you, or dishonors you, or takes something of yours, then pray like this: ‘Lord, we are all your creatures. Pity your servants, and turn them to repentance,’ and then you will perceptibly bear grace in your soul. Induce your heart to love your enemies, and the Lord, seeing your good will, shall help you in all things, and will Himself show you experience. But whoever thinks evil of his enemies does not have love for God and has not known God.” —St. Silouan the Athonite, Writing, IX.21
“The sun shines on all alike, and vainglory beams on all activities. For instance, I am vainglorious when I fast; and when I relax the fast in order to be unnoticed, I am again vainglorious over my prudence. When well-dressed I am quite overcome by vainglory, and when I put on poor clothes I am vainglorious again. When I talk I am defeated, and when I am silent I am again defeated by it. However I throw this prickly-pear, a spike stands upright.” —St. John Climacus
“Watch your heart during all your life — examine it, listen to it, and see what prevents its union with the most blessed Lord. Let this be for you the science of all sciences, and with God’s help, you will easily observe what estranges you from God, and what draws you towards Him and unites you to Him. It is the evil spirit more than anything that stands between our hearts and God; he estranges God from us by various passions, or by the desire of the flesh, by the desires of the eyes, and by worldly pride.” —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
"Have you ever observed the life of the heart? Try it even for a short time and see what you find. Something unpleasant happens, and you get irritated; some misfortune occurs, and you pity yourself; you see someone whom you dislike, and animosity wells up within you; you meet one of your equals who has now outdistanced you on the social scale, and you begin to envy him; you think of your talents and capabilities, and you begin to grow proud… All this is rottenness: vainglory, carnal desire, gluttony, laziness, malice-one on top of the other, they destroy the heart.” —St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco
Brethren, before the face of my God I write: Humble your hearts, and while yet on this earth you will see the mercy of the Lord, and know your Heavenly Creator, and your souls will never have their fill of love.” —St. Silouan the Athonite
“Here are those of whom I speak and who are called heretics by me. They are the ones who say that in our present age there is no one in our midst who is able to observe the commandments and be like the holy fathers…. Those who declare this is impossible have fallen not into one particular heresy but into all of them, so to speak – a heresy surpassing all others in its impiety and greatest blasphemy. They are buried underneath it…. The one who speaks in such a manner turns all of Scripture upside down…. These antichrists affirm, ‘It is impossible, impossible’. Why then is it impossible? Tell me. In what other way did the saints shine on earth and did they become lamps of the world? If it were impossible, they would never have succeeded in it. For they were men like us, and possessed no more than we do except a will directed toward the good. They had zeal, patience, humility, and love for God. Therefore, acquire all this and your soul which today is as hard as rock shall become a fountain of tears inside you. However, if you refuse to suffer such anguish and affliction, at least do not say that all this is impossible.” —St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses, Discourse XXIX: The Heresy of Pusillanimity
“He who in his heart is proud of his tears and secretly condemns those who do not weep is like a man who asks the king for a weapon against his enemy and then commits suicide with it.” —St. John Climacus
“If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.” —St. John Chrysostom
“A rich man is not one who has much, but one who gives much. For what he gives away remains his forever.” —St. John Chrysostom
“No one in creation is rich but he that fears God; no one is truly poor but he that lacks the truth.” —St. Ephrem the Syrian
“Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little, and have a cup of tea.” —Elder Sophrony of Essex
“So in every test, let us say: "Thank you, my God, because this was needed for my salvation."” —Elder Paisios of Mount Mt. Athos
“Only the benumbed soul doesn't pray. Preserve in yourselves the feeling of need, and you will always have stimulation for prayer.” —St. Theophan the Recluse
“And the second commandment of the Teaching; Thou shalt not commit murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not commit paederasty, thou shalt not commit fornication, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not practise magic, thou shalt not practise witchcraft, thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” —Didache 2:2
“You shall not take the life of the child by obtaining an abortion. Nor, again, shall you destroy him after he is born.” —St. Barnabas, Epistle of St. Barnabas
“The mold in the womb may not be destroyed.” —Tertullian
“We acknowledge, therefore, that life begins with conception, because we contend that the soul begins at conception. Life begins when the soul begins.
For us, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter when you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a man which is going to be one: you have the fruit already in the seed.” —Tertullian, Apology 9:6
“Now the entire process of sowing, forming, and completing the human embryo in the womb is no doubt regulated by some power, which ministers herein to the will of God, whatever may be the method which it is appointed to employ. Even the superstition of Rome, by carefully attending to these points, imagined the goddess Alemona to nourish the foetus in the womb; as well as [the goddesses] Nona and Decima, called after the most critical months of gestation; and Partula, to manage and direct parturition; and Lucina, to bring the child to the birth and light of day. We, on our part, believe the angels to officiate herein for God. The embryo therefore becomes a human being in the womb from the moment that its form is completed (conception). The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion, inasmuch as there exists already the rudiment of a human being, which has imputed to it even now the condition of life and death, since it is already liable to the issues of both, although, by living still in the mother, it for the most part shares its own state with the mother.” —Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul, Ch. XXXVII, On the Formation and State of the Embryo, Its Relation with the Subject of this Treatise
“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” —Tertullian
“…if we would not kill off the human race born and developing according to God's plan, then our whole lives would be lived according to nature. Women who make use of some sort of deadly abortion drug kill not only the embryo but, together with it, all human kindness.” —St. Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator, Volume II, page 10
“Those who use abortifacients commit homicide.” —St. Clement of Alexandria
“Women who were reputed believers began to resort to drugs for producing sterility. They also girded themselves around, so as to expel what was being gestated. For they did not wish to have a child by either slave or by any common fellow - out of concern for their family and their excessive wealth. See what a great impiety the lawless one has advanced! He teaches adultery and murder at the same time!” —St. Hipploytus, Refutation Of All Heresies
“He [Novatian] struck the womb of his wife with his heel and produced a hurried an abortion, thereby causing parricide.” —St. Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 52 To Cornelius
“The wealthy, in order that their inheritance may not be divided among several, deny in the very womb their own progeny. By use of' parricidal mixtures they snuff out the fruit of their wombs in the genital organs themselves. In this way life is taken away before it is born… Who except man himself has taught us ways of repudiating children?” —St. Ambrose of Milan
“Sometimes their sadistic licentiousness goes so far that they procure poison to produce infertility, and when this is of no avail, they find one means or another to destroy the unborn and flush it from the mother's womb. For they desire to see their offspring perish before it is alive or, if it has already been granted life, they seek to kill it within the mother's body before it is born.” —St. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book One, Ch. 16
“A woman who has deliberately destroyed a fetus must pay the penalty for murder… those also who give drugs causing abortions are murderers themselves, as well as those who receive the poison which kills the fetus.” —St. Basil the Great, First Canonical Letter, 188:2 and 188:8
“Women also who administer drugs to cause abortion, as well as those who take poisons to destroy unborn children, are murderesses.” —St. Basil the Great, Letter CLXXXVIII: Canonica Prima, to Amphilochius, concerning the Canons, VII
“The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. The hair-splitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us.” —St. Basil the Great
“For every argument there is a counter-argument, but who can argue against life?” —St. Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts
“If you can't feed a hundred people, feed just one.”
“I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.”
“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
“If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway.”
“It is a poverty that a child must die, so that you may live as you wish.”
“How can you say there are too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.”
“The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”
“Any Country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants.”
“We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”
“Do not look for big things, just do small things with great love… The smaller the thing the greater must be our love.
“God did not call us to be successful, but to be faithful.”
“Go out into the world today and love the people you meet. Let your presence light new light in the hearts of people.”
“There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.”
“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
“Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.”
—Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
“No one heals himself by wounding another.” —St. Ambrose of Milan
“Abortion is the anti-Christ's demonic parody of the Eucharist. That's why it uses the same holy words ‘This is my body’ with the blasphemous opposite meaning.” —Dr. Peter Kreeft
“An Irish pro-abortion leader described their vote as a decision to enter the "modern" world. That was extremely well-said. Modernity suggests to us that we are the masters of history, the arbiters of life and death. Our compassion for the suffering is always expressed, ultimately, in our willingness to kill them, without remorse.
For many, abortion has become the sacrament of modernity, in which we learn to say in blasphemous irony: ‘This is my body.’” —Fr. Stephen Freeman
“O God, grant us a deeper sense of fellowship with all living things, our little brothers and sisters to whom in common with us you have given this earth as home. We recall with regret that in the past we have acted high-handedly and cruelly in exercising our domain over them. Thus, the voice of the earth which should have risen to you in song has turned into a groan of travail. May we realize that all these creatures also live for themselves and for you - not for us alone. They too love the goodness of life, as we do, and serve you better in their way than we do in ours. Amen.” —St. Basil the Great
“We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.” —St. John Chrysostom
“…surely we ought to show kindness and gentleness to animals for many reasons, and chiefly because they are of the same origin as ourselves.” —St. John Chrysostom
“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.” —St. Gregory of Nyssa
