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All Quotes by author - Lewis B. Smedes

" Any lazy or biased fool can have opinions; making judgments is the hard work of responsible and compassionate people. "

" As I read the New Testament, I find only one path to salvation - the path of an informed faith in Jesus Christ. "

" At the cross, God was punishing Jesus for the sins of the world. God's justice required a penalty from sinners, and in his unspeakable love, he paid the penalty himself in the person of his crucified Son. "

" Common sense suggests that if no one ever judged other people, there would be no real human community. "

" Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. "

" Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. "

" God does not give us salvation because we believe. Our believing is only the normal way of receiving the salvation he freely gives. "

" God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat. "

" I believe that we should, on biblical grounds, tell all parents of mentally disabled children that God loves their children, regrets terribly that they are disabled, and will, when they die, carry them gently into a heavenly life where every person is forever whole. "

" In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable: no teacher would grade a student's performance; no citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account. "

" It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited. "

" Jesus said that we should render to the state what properly belongs to the state, and though he had taxes in mind, we might reasonably infer that giving the state the job of punishing wrongdoers is one way of giving the state its due. "

" Modern Americans suffer from a fear of judging. Passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is considered an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance. "

" My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died. "

" Nobody sees reality whole; we all need others to show us the parts of it that they see better than we do. Nobody sees reality with total accuracy; we all need others to correct our own vision. "

" No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves. "

" No one really forgives unless he has been hurt. "

" Nothing enables us to forgive like knowing in our hearts that we have been forgiven. "

" Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body. "

" Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness. "

" Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do. "

" Our society is pluralistic. We who accept the privilege of membership in that society agree to respect the people's right to live by their own religious precepts. "

" Promise keeping is a powerful means of grace in a time when people hardly depend on each other to remember and live by their word. "

" Restorative justice is not a replacement of retributive justice, but a complement. It seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer and the repair of the victim's injury. "

" Retributive justice did not arise from any Christian principle; almost every pre-Christian society dealt with wrongdoers by causing them pain. "

" Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard. "

" Some people have loved ones they will not forsake, even though they are a pain in the neck. "

" Some people still have causes they will not desert, even though the cause seems lost. "

" Some people still make promises and keep those they make. When they do, they help make life around them more stably human. "

" Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit. "

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