Quotes By Lionel Blue

I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.

My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.

Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.

In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.

I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

So many plusses, so many minuses.

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.

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.

Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.