Protestantism Quotes

“I cannot choose but adhere to the word of God, which has possession of my conscience; nor can I possibly, nor will I even make any recantation, since it is neither safe nor honest to act contrary to conscience! Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God! Amen.”
― Martin Luther

“Although it is very easy to marry a wife, it is very difficult to support her along with the children and the household. Accordingly, no one notices this faith of Jacob. Indeed, many hate fertility in a wife for the sole reason that the offspring must be supported and brought up. For this is what they commonly say: ‘Why should I marry a wife when I am a pauper and a beggar? I would rather bear the burden of poverty alone and not load myself with misery and want.’ But this blame is unjustly fastened on marriage and fruitfulness. Indeed, you are indicting your unbelief by distrusting God’s goodness, and you are bringing greater misery upon yourself by disparaging God’s blessing. For if you had trust in God’s grace and promises, you would undoubtedly be supported. But because you do not hope in the Lord, you will never prosper.”
― Martin Luther, The Sermons Of Martin Luther

“The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church.”
― Karl Barth

“[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn't look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line--something limited to the neighbors.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.”
― Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

“In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as a judiciary. He is absolute head of government, legislator and supreme judge in the church. If he wanted to, he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests, make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with this Protestant churches. What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama?”
― Hans Küng

“Other translations may engage the mind, but the King James Version is the Bible of the heart.”
― David Norton, The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today

“The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.”
― Martin Luther

“When Belloc said that the Protestant Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom, he was simply stating a historical fact, but it was controversial because history is political.”
― Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc

“I think both Protestants and Catholics have killed the woman for the sake of the mother. (Rubem Alves, p. 201)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

“Yesterday I asked a five-year-old child who Jesus was. You know what he replied? A
statue.”
― Luther Blissett, Q

“It is an irony still to be appreciated by many scholars that by so maximizing sinfulness (before God every man is guilty of every conceivable sin) Protestants tried to minimize its psychological burden (no man is required to ponder and recite his every actual sin)”
― Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland

“The Lutheran formula for a good life: commit as many as sins as possible then absolve yourself of all accountability by saying, “But I believe!” No wonder Lutheranism became so popular.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Evangelical Protestants: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

“It was sharpest of all for Protestants who did not belong to tightly organised and disciplined churches, in which there was either formal confession of sins (as in many Lutheran churches) or systematic oversight of the moral status of church members (as in many Calvinist churches). Those systems did not solve the problem of belief logically, but they did solve it emotionally, since anxious Christians could outsource their concern about themselves to the ministers who policed them. It was a kind of fideism: you cannot be certain of your own beliefs, but you can place your trust in your community instead.”
― Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

“Lorsque le marxisme traditionnel, idéologie immanente à la modernisation, cherche à restreindre les concepts de travail abstrait et d'abstraction réelle à la sphère de la circulation, il ne trahit pas seulement par là sa contamination par l'éthique protestante, le productivisme capitaliste et une fausse ontologie transhistorique du travail, mais surtout sa limitation à l'espace interne au système producteur de marchandises moderne et à son temps abstrait.”
― Robert Kurz, The Substance of Capital

“there is a deeper question and it is the explicit Protestant and Saxon philosophy that plans the extinction of the Catholic and Hispanic world vision. This is a task for which over a long time they have been mobilizing a force worse than the military, than usury or any legal fallacies: the penetration by sects which confuse, corrode and consume the remaining vestiges of Christian civilization. (The Black Legends and Hispanic Catholic Culture, pp. 124-125).”
― Charles A. Coulombe, Puritan's Empire

“Science is to mathematics as Protestantism is to Catholicism, an irrational protest against reason, based on faith.”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

“No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!”
― Robert Frost, A Further Range

“Protestantism, like the modern world, is built upon mere negation, the same negation of principles that is the essence of individualism; and one can see in it one more example, and a most striking one, of the state of anarchy and dissolution that has arisen from this negation.”
― René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World

“During a sinister interchange between one of the little princes and his wicked uncle, Richard III, the prince wonders how truth is passed down the ages - whether through the written or the spoken word (3.1.75-83). The prince believes, he says innocently, that the history of the Tower of London - a choice of subject never far from the minds of English Catholics - would survive simply by word of mouth, even if it were never written down. The little prince has stepped into dangerous territory. He is not only defending the role of tradition against scripture - a central Catholic Reformation stance - but he also suggests that the grisly truth about England's persecutions will survive irrespective of what appears in history books.”
― Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare

“There is only one heaven and it is open to all, because our religion stands for boundless humanity.”
― Laura Chouette

“There is only one heaven and it is open to all, because our religion stands for borderless humanity.”
― Laura Chouette

“We see that the Scholastics are reasoning, whatever their logic tells them they come up with. And once you speculate on the idea of newness, you begin to say, “Why can’t we have something new now? Because Christianity itself becomes stale. Our monks have become corrupt.” That’s what Francis was rebelling against. He wanted to have himself a purer poverty. And therefore from the very idea of Christianity, once the idea of Christian tradition is removed, you logically have the idea of a “new” Christianity, some new flowering of wisdom, spirituality, and actually a new revelation. This, again, is the “Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoyevsky, the making of a new Christianity better than Christianity was.

And of course all that time released Protestantism and all the sects of today. And the source for this is no longer the Orthodox tradition, which is lost; the source is either reason or visions. At this time of course we have all these new things arising in the Catholic Church, the new orders: Dominicans, Franciscans, and all the rest, the very idea that this is the normal way. And so these two, Francis and Joachim, will be very influential in later times. People keep coming back to their ideas because they are in the seed period of the modern age.”
― Seraphim Rose, Orthodox Survival Course

“Science became important in this period because man, being set free from Orthodox tradition, turned his attention to the outer world. This attention to the outer world sometimes took forms which were notoriously pagan and immoral. But this worldly interest was also expressed in the rise of industry and capitalism and in the movement of exploration — discovery of America and so forth — these movements which were to change the face of the earth in future centuries. This one might speak of as the kind of leaven of worldliness which would penetrate the whole world and give the tone to today’s world which totally lacks the traditional Orthodox sense of the fear of God, and in fact is possessed by triviality.

Protestantism is full of this tone which can be observed by looking at the behaviour of any Protestant minister to compare it with the behaviour of an Orthodox priest. The Catholic priest also has this same worldly tone, worldly spirit; and Orthodox priests who are losing the savour of Orthodoxy enter into this very same light-minded, jazzy, up-to-date feeling which is the influence of worldliness, which makes possible such a thing as Disneyland and those things which any sane person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and, above all, in traditional Christian civilization, would have regarded as some kind of madness.”
― Seraphim Rose

“In 1653, when God took a turn for the worse, the gusto with which the English took to a life of self-restraint undoubtedly contained an element of debauchery. If we don't suffer, how shall we know that we live?”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“Geen Priester vergeeft u de misslagen uit kracht van ’t gezag eener kerk, die deze vergeving op ’t gruwlijkst misbruikt en verbeurd heeft. Hy zal u voor een hand vol gelds niet zeggen: al hadt gy de moeder gods verkracht of al doet gy het nog, ik ontsla u van schuld en open de poorten des hemels in des H. Petrus naam. Maar uw medechristen zal met u bidden tot Hem van wien alle vergeving komt, die voor uwe wandaden geleden heeft, die ’t berouw dat gy voelt in uw hart werkt, en ook u het onbedrieglijk woord heeft gegeven, dat Hy in het uur der benaauwdheid u hooren en redden zal.”
― Willem Bilderdijk, Een protestant aan zijne medeprotestanten ter gelegenheid van de afschetsing der voortreffelijkheid van den katholyken kerkler door J. G. le Sage ten Broek. 1816 [Leather Bound]

“Under the ancien régime, the laws of the Church guaranteed workers ninety days of rest (fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight public holidays), during which they were strictly prohibited from working. This was the great crime of Catholicism and the principle cause of irreligion among the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.... Protestantism, which is the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less concerned with days of rest for the people. It banished the saints from heaven in order to do away with their feast days on earth.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy