The Wordy Shipmates Quotes
"The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed."
"If God be the gardener, who shall pluck up what he sets down?"
"The price? Obedience. Break God’s laws and suffer ye His wrath."
"The word of God, not a man of God, is The Man."
"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."
"We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body."
"To whom much is given, of him God will require the more."
"We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world."
"The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people."
"Puritanism was not an anti-intellectual fundamentalism; it was a learned, scholarly movement."
"The departing of good people from a country does not cause a judgment, but warns of it."
"We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a shining city on a hill."
"How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison?"
"A corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. ... Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."
"What a terrible irony that our country, which was founded by refugees seeking religious freedom—would now be responsible for this kind of abuse."
"The eyes of all people are upon us. And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up."
"The Magna Carta's reframing of due process is the main foundation of English freedom."
"The Massachusetts Bay Charter is merely the legal subset of the original patent God granted His very first human creation."
"God’s children, like true lovers, delight to be private, and fervent with their heavenly father and husband."
"The fathers made the children heretics and the children the father."
"God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in His servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls."
"Williams means that a civil state should permit all forms of religion, including the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences."
"The said opinions were adjudged by all, magistrates and ministers, to be erroneous, and very dangerous."
"If thy brother be in want and thou canst help him, if thou lovest God thou must help him."
"The mouse was a poor contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom."
"We whose names are hereunder desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good of the body, in an orderly way, by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, only in civil things."
"Beside the yearly loss of no small matter in my trading with English and natives, I was debarred from Boston, the chief mart and port of New England."
"It was not price nor money that could have purchased Rhode Island."
"For so are we all Indians as the English are and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly."
"Our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl."
"These English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved."
"The Mystic Massacre set a precedent. The mass murder of the Pequot made the mass murder of other tribes possible and therefore repeatable."
"That year, 1898, was the magic moment when the United States became a true world power."
"Anne herself is guided by John Cotton. Cotton is why they’re here."
"The word Winthrop uses to characterize Hutchinson and Wheelwright’s thought is 'antinomian', which means 'against the law'."
"They are angry with her because she has accused all the ministers except for Cotton and her brother-in-law, Wheelwright, of preaching only a covenant of works, a Puritan put-down."
"She should have been a minister or a magistrate. She should have had John Cotton’s job—or John Winthrop’s."
"Williams even holds a three-day-long debate in Newport with three Quakers."