Lyman Abbott

Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.

It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity.

In New York - whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame - not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Patience is passion tamed.

The only tastes worth having are acquired tastes.

Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry and sin not.

Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.

The brotherhood of man is an integral part of Christianity no less than the Fatherhood of God; and to deny the one is no less infidel than to deny the other.