Quotes By Lionel Blue

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

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

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

For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.

Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.

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

I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.

It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.

Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.

The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.

My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.