Inspirational Quotes by Harry Emerson Fosdick
“I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.”
topics: War
“I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.”
topics: War
“The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.”
topics: War
“The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.”
“Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.”
topics: Hatred
“Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.”
topics: Government
“the prayer of dominant desire always tends to attain its object.”
“Prayer is hunger and thirst. Prayer is our demand on life, elevated, purified, and aware of a Divine Alliance.”
“There is one sense, however, in which answer to prayer can always be depended on, if a man has kept his life at all in harmony with God. Even when God cannot answer affirmatively the man's petition he can answer the man.”
“There are many prayers that God must not answer, but there are no good prayers which God cannot answer.”
“I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ.”
“Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself.”
“No man is the whole of himself; his friends are the rest of him.”
topics: Friendship
“Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable.”
“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”
topics: Examples
“God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.”
topics: Eternity
“He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.”
“The real war is inward of which the outer action is but the echo and reverberation.”
topics: Conscience
“All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person's place.”
topics: Compassion
“To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.”
topics: Compassion
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1878-1969
Harry Emerson Fosdick was an American clergyman. He was born in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Colgate University in 1900, and Union Theological Seminary in 1904. While attending Colgate University he joined the Delta Upsilon Fraternity. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1903 at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church at 31st Street. Fosdick was the most prominent liberal Baptist minister of the early 20th Century. Although a Baptist, he was Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church on West Twelfth Street and then at the historic, interdenominational Riverside Church (the congregation moved from the then-named Park Avenue Baptist Church, now the Central Presbyterian Church) in New York City.
Fosdick became a central figure in the conflict between fundamentalist and liberal forces within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s. He saw the history of Christianity as one of development, progress, and gradual change. To the fundamentalists, this was rank apostasy, and the battle lines were drawn.
Fosdick was an outspoken opponent of racism and injustice. Fosdick's sermons won him wide recognition, as did his radio addresses which were nationally broadcast. He authored numerous books, and many of his sermon collections are still in print. He is also the author of the hymn, "God of Grace and God of Glory"