Apologist Quotes

The work of God which is conversion is truly saving in the most personal sense. There is not – as some folk vainly preach – an element of self-denial or restriction in conversion. The converted man does not denounce or give up what he was before as a person, but what he was before as a person is, in conversion, restored to him in maturity and fulfillment. It was so with Paul – who was a great zealot. Before his conversion, Paul was the most zealous persecutor of Christ. After his conversion, Paul becomes the most zealous evangelist and apologist. Both before and after, Paul is still Paul the zealot. Paul is still the person he is in every sense, save that now that which he is, is freed from tribute to death and fulfilled – made new – brought to mature humanity – in Christ. ~ William Stringfellow

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

His true intention becomes clear by the choice of people he interviewed: every one of them a conservative apologist! ~ Robert M. Price

Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source ... To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide. ~ Ward Churchill

When an apologist attempts to be autonomous in his reasoned argumentation he indicates that he considers God to be less certain than his own existence and that he places greater credence in his independent reasoning than in God's Word. ~ Greg L. Bahnsen

When you put your faith in big government, you end up an apologist for mass murder. ~ Karl Hess

I tell Mum she married a patriarch
Look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s
And your point is?
You really can't expect him to 'get you', as you put it
I let her know she's an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women
She says human beings are complex
I tell her not patronize me ~ Bernardine Evaristo

above all the temptation to think that God is no more certain than our best arguments for him. As C. S. Lewis admitted, I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our own hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments . . . from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. ~ Os Guinness

Reason, it seems to me, is useless in these matters, becomes either an apologist for faith or its persecutor. Catch me tomorrow; I may change my mind. Today, I'm happy deferring to the muddle. ~ Chris Chester

The philosopher is not an apologist; apologetic concern, as Karl Barth (the one living theologian of unquestionable genius) has rightly insisted, is the death of serious theologizing, and I would add, equally of serious work in the philosophy of religion. ~ Donald M. MacKinnon

What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst. ~ Lionel Blue

God is his own best apologist. ~ Os Guinness

...those who deny or oppose these so pleasant delights (of virtue), do so only from jealousy, you may be sure, from the barbarous pleasure of making others as guilty and unhappy as they are. They are blind and would like everyone to be the same, they are mistaken, and would like everyone else to be mistaken; but if you could see into the depths of their hearts you would find only sorrow and repentance; all these apostles of crime are only evil and desperate people; you would not find a sincere person among them who would not admit, if he were truthful, that their poisonous words or dangerous writings had not been guided only by their passions. And what man in fact can say in cold blood that the bases of morality can be shaken without risk? What being would dare maintain that doing good and desiring good are not essentially the aim of mankind? And how can a man who will do only evil expect to be happy in a society whose strongest concern is the perpetual increase of good? But will not this apologist of crime not shudder himself when he had uprooted from all hearts the only thing which could lead to his conversion? What will stop his servants ruining him, if they have ceased to be virtuous? ~ Marquis De Sade

Each layman must be his own apologist, responsible for his stewardship of the Gospel in his daily life and work. ~ William Stringfellow

To read an expert contribution on growing up Muslim in America by Abdu Murray, a lawyer, apologist, former Shia Muslim, and author of two published books on Islam and other major worldviews, click here. ~ Nabeel Qureshi

Anything But An Apologist for the Lefties and All of Their Causes. ~ Frank Rich

I'm a Lebanese woman who directs films. That's not it at all. I am not really a woman nor am I really an Arab. Because I am not an apologist for women, nor of sentimental "world" films. ~ Danielle Arbid

The role of the Christian apologist is not to re-invent Christianity; it would cease to be Christianity if I did! ~ Joe Boot

I am no apologist for Fidel's [Castro] regime. It is, after all, a totalitarian regime. So I would like to see that change. ~ John Gimlette

Some people are ignorant of the world but educated in Scripture, and are therefore prone to missing the relevance of Scripture - these sometimes, later, amidst life's challenges and doubts, turn from the faith; other people are ignorant of Scripture but educated in the world, and are therefore prone to missing the truth of Scripture - they are often those who ridicule the faith. The apologist stands somewhere in the center. He articulates where some are prone to understanding the truth in beauty, others the beauty in truth - that of a spiritual Creator in relation to his scientific creation. ~ Criss Jami

I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis. ~ A.C. Grayling

In the last essay he wrote before he died, great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis said, "We have no right to happiness; only an obligation to do our duty." Of course it is in our duty that happiness comes. Try it. ~ Billy Graham

Size is important, no matter what our apologist sisters say. ~ Tom Robbins

I don't think I need to be an apologist for working hard and being a very large taxpayer. ~ Anthony Scaramucci

Fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist. ~ Gertrude Atherton

Some Western biographies are apologist, and do not portray the negative side at all. ~ Deepak Chopra

Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. ~ C.S. Lewis

The Christian apologist has become someone who is virtually expected to apologize for being a Christian, and that has to stop. ~ Richard Platt

Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off ... By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse. ~ Anthony Bourdain

In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend. ~ J. Gresham Machen

TV's Tony Snow becomes the White House press secretary. How will he make the difficult transition from Fox News reporter to Republican apologist? ... Mr. President, it is time to hire the folks who've never let you down. Limbaugh at Health and Human Services. Hannity at State. Then give Rummy the Medal of Freedom and install Bill O'Reilly as secretary of defense. Only problem, you might find yourself invading Vermont. And I'll replace Chertoff at Homeland Security. The man's done nothing to control the bear population. ~ Stephen Colbert

You can't get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Perhaps myself the first, at some expense of popularity, to unfold the true character of Jefferson, it is too late for me to become his apologist. Nor can I have any disposition to do it. I admit that his politics are tinctured with fanaticism, that he is too much in earnest in his democracy, that he has been a mischievous enemy to the principle measures of our past administration, that he is crafty & persevering in his objects, that he is not scrupulous about the means of success, nor very mindful of truth, and that he is a contemptible hypocrite. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Clearly, Valdez was an apologist for the industrialists and polluters, the big American companies that dominated Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. Not surprising to find such a person here, since the CIA had controlled Costa Rica for decades. This wasn't a country; it was a subsidiary of American business interests. And American businesses did not give a damn for the environment. ~ Michael Crichton

In March 2008, the Al-Arabiya news channel denounced my book The Truth about Muhammad, claiming that it contained "lies and hate." Its article quoted the Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong as saying that the book was "written in hatred" and contains "basic and bad mistakes of fact."8 The jihad terror group Hamas soon joined in the denunciation, thundering that my book was not just full of "lies," but was actually part of a "campaign by Western extremists against the religion of Islam and values that are sacred to Moslems," and was "another in a series of actions designed to distort the image of Islam in the public eye."9 ~ Robert Spencer

Individualists and collectivists both have been wronged by the government, and we all maintain (consciously or subconsciously) a list of the ways our lives have been diminished by its bureaucracies and actions. One of the differences between the collectivists and the individualists is that those wrongs are front and center for the individualists, whereas the collectivists are blind to those wrongs, or they excuse those wrongs, or they forgive those wrongs. "Use us," the collectivists say, while they throw not only themselves into the bottomless pit that is the Administrative State, but everybody else too. ~ Mike Klepper

I once sheepishly asked a prominent Evangelical apologist, with his PhD in New Testament, if he had ever chanced to read Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined. He had not. Things began to become clear to me. He didn't know that all his trusty arguments had been thoroughly refuted many decades before he was born. ~ Robert M. Price

The biggest challenge was to make sure that we are looking at things honestly and truthfully. We weren't making an apologist film. That was the toughest part. ~ Cate Shortland

Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes. ~ Timothy Noah

Each admission here defies a blood vow determined long before my birth. An apologist is a traitor of the highest order. How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses? The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code. It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions. If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down. Our silence is our bond. The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal. ~ Eve Ensler

When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole. ~ Anna Quindlen

By reversing the proper order of things, the non-presuppositional apologist sees submission to God's Word as secondary, rather than primary, sees demonstration as the basis for faith, sees independent argumentation rather than the Holy Spirit as the source of conviction, and therefore advances the destruction of his own defense of the faith. ~ Greg L. Bahnsen