James Alison Quotes

#1. The silence of those in positions of influence in the church who know, or have a strong suspicion, that being gay is a nonpathological minority variant in the human condition drives me crazy, far crazier than I am driven by any loud-mouthed purveyor of hateful nonsense.

James Alison

#2. It's my firm intention to whop cancer into submission and I truly believe I've given myself the best start possible by radically overhauling my diet and by staying true to my motto, which is: Don't worry, be happy, feel good. The first thing I did when I was diagnosed was to turn vegan.

Larry Hagman

#3. The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility.

Charles Lamb

#4. I'm trying to make the case that the church can indeed, from within its own resources, move out of a false, and often a hateful, characterization of and set of attitudes toward gay and lesbian people.

James Alison

#5. I think I have quite traditional views on original sin, grace, and the real but difficult nature of we humans being able to learn something true about being human that we didn't know before. And yet the consequences of this traditional view are really quite radical.

James Alison

#6. The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.

James Alison

#7. My own belief is that being gay is a regularly occurring nonpathological minority variant in the human condition, and that an appropriate analogy is left-handedness, which also, as it happens, used to be regarded as some sort of defect in a normatively right-handed humanity.

James Alison

#8. The leaders of the world's largest economies agreed during the November 2008 G20 summit not to create barriers hindering global trade and capital flows. Russia shares these principles.

Vladimir Putin

#9. I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.

James Alison

#10. A thought given out every day to others and to the world can have a great effect.

Gary Markwick

#11. The common Christian practice compartmentalizing knowledge into sacred and secular is unbiblical and leads to the dangerous notion that secular knowledge is somehow less important, worldly, and hence unfit for the spiritual Christian.

Ronald H. Nash

#12. Peer beyond the wall of doubt to embrace the possibilities.

Truth Devour

#13. I'm not sure that I've ever been drawn to the academic life as such. Theology has been a matter of survival for me. If I have a carapace of academic presentability, it is thanks to the wonderful teachers I had.

James Alison

#14. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.

Shawn Achor

#15. Imagination is glow of thoughts by supernatural force.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#16. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.

William Shakespeare

#17. Give people a common enemy, and you will give them a common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you will deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are.

James Alison

#18. Commitments, not feelings, hold life together.

Mason Cooley

#19. Part of my motivation in the search for a cause of being gay was the need to find "something that has gone wrong that I can put right," and it was good, spiritually fruitful, to discover that the question "What went wrong in where I came from?" is actually not a useful one.

James Alison

#20. I'm not much of a multitasker, and when I'm in productive mode, organizational things suffer.

James Alison

#21. I take a lean-startup approach: creating agile, interdisciplinary teams that get the minimum viable product to market as soon as possible. It's my job to be entrepreneur-in-residence, an internal change agent.

Todd Park

#22. Never feel bad for being assertive, speaking your mind, and putting your foot down. What you think is anger, others see as a good solid display of self-esteem.

Alison James

#23. One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.

Elias Canetti

#24. I go up to people and ask if I can use them in my photos. Occasionally it is the person in question, as happened with James Hewitt. How embarrassing. He just laughed and said, 'You can't afford me.'

Alison Jackson