No, sir, I live by the church. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night III I 2
Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there:
And ’twill be found upon examination
The latter has the largest congregation. Daniel Defoe, from The True-Born Englishman
‘What is a church?’ – Our honest sexton tells,
’Tis a tall building, with a tower and bells.’ George Crabbe, 1754-1832, The Borough, 1810
I like working on churches. It’s so nice and peaceful. And then I like doing a bit of grave-stone reading. Fred Dibnah, Life With Fred 1/4, BBC 1984
St Walburge’s [spire] in Preston: 311 feet high; they reckon it’s the tallest church steeple in England. Fred Dibnah’s Magnificent Monuments s1e3: Places of Worship, BBC 2000
Man has been using stones to build places of worship for thousands of years. ibid.
Avebury has been an important place of worship for nearly four and a half millennia. ibid.
I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence. Doug McLeod
As some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine, but the music there. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism 1711
It is the church’s duty to have a place of protection for its people. Jim Jones, The People’s Temple, cited Stanley Nelson ‘Jim Jones: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple’
I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death. George Carlin
Don’t give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you. George Carlin
He cannot have God for his father who has not the Church for his mother. St Cyprian 200-258
There cannot be salvation for any, except in the Church. St Cyprian
The quality of the Lord’s church on earth, cannot be seen by any man, so long as he lives in the world, still less how the church in process of time has turned aside from good to evil. Emanuel Swedenborg
Every day people are straying away from the Church and going back to God. Lenny Bruce
The Church’s Restoration
In eighteen-eighty-three
Has left for contemplation
Not what there used to be.
How well the ancient woodwork
Looks round the Rect’ry hall,
Memorial of the good work
Of him who plann’d it all. John Betjeman, Hymn
Come Hear How You Will Be Punished. Church sign, First Assembly of God
Jesus Was Very Angry About Last Week’s Collection. Church sign, churchsigngenerator online
Never go into the Church, Ossian, my grandmother said to me. Because God is not fun. John Le Mesurier
Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches. St Thomas Aquinas
Traditional Christianity, that institutional form of Christianity is probably dying ... We’ve blessed slavery with the Christian scriptures, we’ve blessed anti-Semitism with the Christian scriptures, we stood by and watched Hitler destroy six million Jews, and then we were negative about women, and then we were negative about gay people, and we’ve been negative about left-handed people, we’ve been negative about mentally ill people, and we’ve been negative about divorced people, the Church has victimised a great many people in this world. Rt Reverend John Shelby Spong, New Jersey March 2007, interview Bruce Burgess, Bloodline
After the above-mentioned millennium which is now about three years past, there occurred throughout the whole world … a rebuilding of church basilicas … It was as if the whole earth, having cast off the old by shaking itself, were clothing itself everywhere in a white robe of churches. Raoul Glabar, re 11th century rebuilding of churches
The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state ...
The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D Thoreau
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary. Bart D Ehrman, ‘Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible’
People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God. Kurt Vonnegut
I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889
The church alone beyond all question
Has for ill-gotten goods the right digestion. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Churches aren’t just spiritual bodies, they are corporations. Ted Haggard
For, where God built a church, there the devil would also build a chapel. Martin Luther
Churches are becoming political organisations. Robert Ingersoll
The Church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless. Robert Ingersoll
We’ve always been environment conscious in Liverpool. In Liverpool we’ve had unleaded churches for years. Ken Dodd
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Matthew 18:20
Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you. I Corinthians 7:5
Your meetings do more harm than good … it is not the lord’s supper you eat. I Corinthians 11:20-22
Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters. And thou wilt find the nearest of them in affection to those who believe (to be) those who say: Lo! We are Christians. That is because there are among them priests and monks, and because they are not proud. Koran 5:82