Legalistic Quotes

#1. Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about "acting like men" and "acting like women," and more time acting like Jesus.

Rachel Held Evans

#2. Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

Joyce Meyer

#3. The first precept in Buddhism is "Do not kill." This precept is not merely a legalistic prohibition, but a realization of our affinity with all who share the gift of life. A compassionate heart provides a firm ground for this precept.

Dhammananda Bhikkhuni

#4. Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of
chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.

Truman Capote

#5. But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent.

Richard A. Posner

#6. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#7. Going back to legalistic roots contaminates the blood of Jesus.

Sherry K. White

#8. What teachings of Scripture do you still mainly follow out of dutiful habit, not with an eye toward honoring God or being used as a blessing to others? What has your legalistic adherence gained for you, and what has it cost you?

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#9. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA.

Eric Hobsbawm

#10. We insist that God must surely lead everyone as we believe He has led us. We refuse to allow God the freedom to deal with each of us as individuals. When we think like that, we are legalistic.

Jerry Bridges

#11. The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.

Charles A. Reich

#12. These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.

Criss Jami

#13. Legalistic remorse says, "I broke God's rules," while real repentance says, "I broke God's heart."

Timothy Keller

#14. Typical of their mania for the trivial, their legalistic fascination with documents, proclamations, ads.

Philip K. Dick

#15. The Bill of Rights isn't some legalistic fine print. It was written to make our lives freer, more prosperous, and happier. By forsaking it, America has become no better than any other country in the world.

Harry Browne

#16. The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity.

Criss Jami

#17. A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

John Updike

#18. There is something childish and legalistic about churches in which all of the saints observe precisely the same standards. When all lives begin to sink into the same mould of denial and exercise of liberty, something is amiss.

Walter J Chantry

#19. Faith cannot be about absolute certainty in the letters of the Bible and wrath against those who don't comply (Ephesians 2:15). It has to be about overwhelming trust in God's love,6 which as the apostle Paul confirms, is beyond the letter of law and narrow legalistic interpretations.

Amos Smith

#20. Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#21. Being in Christ is both gift and task, privilege and responsibility. Exaggerate the gift, and you risk antinomian complacency; exaggerate the responsibility, and you risk legalistic anxiety.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

#22. Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument,

Isabel Allende

#23. Many seducers clutter the simple message of the gospel with legalistic additions, with convoluted attempts to legitimize moral compromise, and with psychological theories that turn churches into relational support groups instead of houses of worship.

Charles R. Swindoll

#24. To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. In our eagerness to get rid of the legalistic doctrine of works we have thrown out the baby with the bath and gotten rid of obedience as well.

A.W. Tozer

#25. You see, the human creature is prone to legalism. There is nothing the devil likes more than to impose a set of legalistic rules on a person. Then when that person has a hard time keeping those rules, his confidence that God will move in his life is greatly shaken.

Dave Roberson

#26. This wasn't a legalistic play. He simply wanted more and more of God.

Matt Chandler

#27. A legalistic commitment to duration can kill one's prayer life.

R. Kent Hughes

#28. Human rights without responsibility, without a sense of decency, a sense of compassion, is not good enough for a society to flourish ... We need to broaden our scope from the legalistic language to the language of the heart.

Tu Weiming

#29. The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil.

Hans Morgenthau

#30. Adams met with a convention on keeping the Sabbath and found the atmosphere surprisingly similar to that in Congress. Legalistic disputes so abounded that he found it difficult to keep order.

Paul C. Nagel

#31. We live in an age so legalistic, we find it hard to imagine someone wanting to obey their God simply because they love their God.

Criss Jami

#32. The Christian stands, not under the dictatorship of a legalistic 'you ought,' but in the magnetic field of Christian Freedom, under the empowering of the 'You may.'

Helmut Thielicke

#33. In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.

Criss Jami

#34. That because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an attitude of acceptance of the universal human situation and a recognition of the participation of every one of us in man's inhumanity to man.

Rollo May