Top 100 Quotes About The Reformation
#1. I'd like to write a history, maybe of the Reformation.
Jane Haddam
#2. As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased.
Ralph Adams Cram
#3. The tradition of putting candles on Christmas trees actually began in Germany. The person who came up with the idea is thought to have been Martin Luther, father of the Reformation.
Christopher Buckley
#4. But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?
Alain De Botton
#5. In Mencken's view, "religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and ... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress" ("The Ascent of Man").
H.L. Mencken
#6. The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#7. From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.
David Cameron
#8. Universal literacy, taken for granted today, was a direct result of the Reformation's reemphasis upon the centrality of Bible reading,
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#9. Cartoons in newspapers have proven to be an effective means of rallying support during times of war, often by the simple device of depicting the enemy as subhuman or even monstrous - much as they did during the Reformation.
Thomas Conley
#10. My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior
BEFORE the Reformation.
John Waters
#11. Now I know not anything that will contribute more to the furtherance of this good work than the bringing of family religion more into practice and reputation. Here the reformation must begin.
Joel R. Beeke
#12. I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that the reformation must be worked.
Thomas Jefferson
#13. The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."
Hilaire Belloc
#14. And buxom, which means only obedient, is now made, in familiar phrases, to stand for wanton; because in an ancient form of marriage, before the Reformation, the bride promised complaisance and obedience, in these terms: "I will be bonair and buxom in bed and at board.
Samuel Johnson
#15. Let us reject this decree. In matters of conscience the majority has no power.
Merle d'Aubigne, History of the Reformation, b. 13, ch. 5.
Ellen G. White
#16. I must honestly declare my conviction that, since the days of the Reformation, there never has been so much profession of religion without practice, so much talking about God without walking with Him, so much hearing God's words without doing them ...
J.C. Ryle
#17. Of publishing a book on religion, my dear sir, I never had an idea. I should as soon think of writing for the reformation of Bedlam, as of the world of religious sects. Of these there must be, at least, ten thousand, every individual of every one of which believes all wrong but his own.
Thomas Jefferson
#18. I've learned that even the word 'jubilee' used in connection with the Reformation can give rise to discussions.
Angela Merkel
#19. Thinking that morality is all about commandments is a relatively new way of thinking, since the Reformation.
Timothy Radcliffe
#20. The church and every Christian are individually responsible for the reformation of the country
Sunday Adelaja
#21. As far as I'm concerned, the reformation of marijuana laws is something that I take seriously. I think it's something that can stimulate the economy.
Asher Roth
#22. The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in yearsthere is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.
Stefan Zweig
#23. The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.
Germaine Greer
#24. It causes the world great indignation that the question of God and his revelation could be taken so seriously, as seriously as it was taken by the teachers and synods of the ancient church, and by Lutherans, Reformed, and Catholics in the century of the Reformation.
Hermann Sasse
#25. The Reformation was cradled in the printing-press, and established by no other instrument.
Agnes Strickland
#26. This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.
H.G.Wells
#27. Before my secret meeting with the Pope I asked him to come wearing white if deep down he agreed with the Reformation. Pretty crazy.
Kevin DeYoung
#28. God Almighty has set before me two Great Objects: the supression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.
William Wilberforce
#29. For the Reformation is nothing other than Augustianianism come to its rights: the turning away from all that is human to rest on God alone for salvation.
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
#30. God wants the church to become the initiator of the reformation and changes in the society
Sunday Adelaja
#31. It would be erroneous to argue that the Reformation broke with the medieval Catholic paradigm in every respect. Some elements of Protestantism were in fact a continuation, even if in a new form, of what typified the Catholic model also.
David J. Bosch
#32. The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#33. I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall briefly express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.
Elizabeth I
#34. Through the Reformation, the mechanical relation of nature and grace was superceded by an ethical one, so that the restoration of the law of God in every sphere of life became the concern of the believer.
Henry R. Van Til
#35. These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of redemption. In fact they glorified in the slightness of their numbers, the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army ... stormtroopers in the front line of the Reformation.
Simon Schama
#36. There was Arctic John, a businessman from Salisbury who doesn't hold water, Bruce Knott, a social worker from Cumberland who spends his lunch hour picking his bum, and Judith Glycerine, the reformation pig.
St John Morris
#37. Men for whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they cannot explain, or generally even imagine.
G.K. Chesterton
#38. Pope Benedict is an amazingly visionary person. What he has done is establish an evolutionary process that will help undo the Reformation. The Anglican Church has been hijacked by modernism, with synods trying to amend the faith and this process will allow traditional Anglicans to be themselves.
Peter Slipper
#40. The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.
Thomas Paine
#41. Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: through no merit of ours, but by his mercy, WE HAVE BEEN RESTORED to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of Grace
Brennan Manning
#42. The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world.
Robert E. Webber
#43. If during the Reformation you were a Catholic who lived in a part of Germany in which Lutheranism was the ascendant religion and the ruler of the province or the region was Lutheran, to stay a Catholic, you either had to be a dissenter or you had to leave.
Susan Jacoby
#44. There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same.
Hilaire Belloc
#45. No churches are empty, where the doctrines of the reformation are duly urged, with purity and energy, upon the people's minds.(Rowland Hill)
Edwin Sidney
#46. The reformation of society and restoration of spirituality should be our goal as Christians
Sunday Adelaja
#47. He is the author of more than sixty books, including The Holiness of God, Chosen by God, The Invisible Hand, Faith Alone, A Taste of Heaven, Truths We Confess, The Truth of the Cross, and The Prayer of the Lord. He also served as general editor of The Reformation Study Bible and
R.C. Sproul
#48. The Reformation did not directly touch the question of the true character of God's church.
John Nelson Darby
#49. I am not sure I can make clear what it means to say I come from the Catholic side of Protestantism, but at the very least, it means that I do not think Christianity began with the Reformation.
Stanley Hauerwas
#50. People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.
Norman Douglas
#51. Every reformation must have its victims. You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return.
Saki
#52. Remorse is the poison of life. Reformation may be its cure.
Charlotte Bronte
#53. Whatever the reason, the fact is that there was no widespread catechetical teaching for Christian children. Things were going to change. The growing awareness of the need for Christian education was one of the chief forces behind the desire in the sixteenth century to reform the rite of baptism.
Hughes Oliphant Old
#54. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
Mark Twain
#55. Turning, then, from this loathsome combination of church and state, and weeping over the follies of our fellow men, who yield themselves the willing dupes and drudges of these mountebanks, I consider reformation and redress as desperate, and abandon them to the Quixotism of more enthusiastic minds.
Thomas Jefferson
#56. If Dr. Mahathir thinks that by ordering the police to act like gangsters he will frighten the people from supporting this reformation movement, he is dreaming. I think he has cut himself off from reality.
Wan Azizah Wan Ismail
#57. First know the Self and then talk of social reformation.
Abhijit Naskar
#58. Some day we'll awake, have a reformation of the heart, teach our kids honor and kill a few sex psychologists, put boys in high schools with men teachers (not sissies), close all the girls' finishing schools, shoot all the effeciency experts and become a nation of God's people once more.
Harry S. Truman
#59. Before there could be any permanent reformation the people must be led to feel their utter inability in themselves to render obedience to God.
Ellen G. White
#60. We must have a new reformation. There must come a violent break with that irresponsible, amusement-mad, paganized pseudo-religion which passes today for the faith of Christ and which is being spread all over the world by unspiritual men employing unscriptural methods to achieve their ends.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#61. It's time for a new Reformation in the Church
to call the Church back to the authority of the Word of God, beginning in Genesis.
Ken Ham
#62. I don't believe in hell. The idea that a supreme being would make hell is ridiculous. An eternity of pain that results in no learning, reformation or rebirth is a nauseating idea. It's one of the reasons I left Christianity. I simply could not accept that version of God.
Anne Rice
#63. A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.
Daisaku Ikeda
#64. I never revolted in vain, as a rebel or as a tyrant, but I rose seeking reformation for the nation of my grandfather Mohammad. I intend to enjoin good and forbid evil, to act according to the traditions of my grandfather, and my father Ali Ibn Abi-Talib.
Husayn Ibn Ali
#65. Reformation names the disunity in which we currently stand. We who remain in the Protestant tradition want to say that Reformation was a success.
Stanley Hauerwas
#66. Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#67. It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.
N. T. Wright
#68. The Protestant Reformation did not merely seek to cleanse the church and deliver it from doctrinal errors, but it also sought the restoration of the whole of life.
Henry R. Van Til
#69. The hour of reformation is always delayed; every delay gives vice another opportunity of fortifying itself by habit.
Samuel Johnson
#70. Without the advent of printing, there would have been no Reformation, and there might well have been no Protestantism either.
Alister E. McGrath
#71. anarchism is to Marxism-Leninism what Anabaptism was to the magisterial Reformation: a revolutionary movement predicated upon negating, rather than seizing control of, state power.
Mark Van Steenwyk
#72. I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;
I'm a Socrates of small fury.
The waves bends with the fish. I'm taught
As water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,
I can hear light on a dry day.
The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am.
Theodore Roethke
#73. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?
Irshad Manji
#74. A judgment pronounced in accordance with the facts can therefore assign to it an historical place only within that movement of reformation which was brought to a victorious issue by King Josiah.
Julius Wellhausen
#75. No repentance, obedience, self-denial, prayers, tears, reformation or ordinances, without the new creation, avail any thing to the salvation of thy soul.
John Flavel
#76. He who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth.
John Milton
#77. My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.
John Adams
#78. Oh pleasure, you're indeed a pleasant thing, / Although one must be damned for you no doubt. / I make a resolution every spring / Of reformation, ere the year run out.
George Gordon Byron
#79. To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. The true Church preaches REGENERATION; not reformation, not education, not legislation, but regeneration.
M. R. DeHaan
#82. The Law saith, Where is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction? The Gospel saith, Christ is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction.
Patrick Hamilton
#83. REPENTANCE, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with continuity of sin.
Ambrose Bierce
#84. It is impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others. This perspective is at the heart of Buddhist teachings.
Daisaku Ikeda
#85. The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.
Nate Silver
#86. The church should become a place of regeneration and reformation
Sunday Adelaja
#87. Many are friends to the success of reformation, not to reformation.
Samuel Rutherford
#88. Even if things don't unfold the way you expected, don't be disheartened or give up. One who continues to advance will win in the end.
Daisaku Ikeda
#89. You and I live at a moment of history that is simultaneously terrible and wonderful. Terrible because of the condition of the society in which we are destined to live out our lives. Wonderful because of the unprecedented opportunities to make a difference in the destiny of a nation and the world.
Philip Lancaster
#90. Rick Warren, the influential evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, says that what the church needs now is a "second Reformation," one based on "deeds, not creeds."2
Harvey Cox
#91. But 'tis the talent of our English nation, Still to be plotting some new reformation.
John Dryden
#92. I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#93. Only a true faith that applies God's Word to everything-incl uding economics-will lead to the revival and reformation our culture needs so badly.
R.C. Sproul
#94. The Spirit is testifying that a new day is dawning. The stage of the world is being set for a fullness of a harvest and a genuine apostolic reformation in a new way.
Mark Chironna
#95. The divine truth cannot be slain. Even though it may be mocked and crucified and buried, it will rise victoriously on the third day and reign in triumph through all eternity." - Reformation martyr.
Ethelbert Stauffer
#96. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under protection of habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
Thomas Jefferson
#97. Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other. With the greater consciousness of the issues involved comes a lesser assurance that an alternative is possible.
Gordon H. Clark
#98. The world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything.
Clive Barker
#99. Harsh reproof is like a violent storm, soon washed down the channel; but friendly admonitions, like a small shower, pierce deep, and bring forth better reformation.
Roger Chamberlain
#100. Lutheran Reformation, from its inception in 1517 down to the Peasants' War of 1525, at once absorbed, and was absorbed by, all the revolutionary elements of the time.
Ernest Belfort Bax
