Quotes By Lionel Blue

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.

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.

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.

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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