Quotes from

Jesus and the Disinherited

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin?  Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself? (preface)

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. (11)

There is a certain grandeur and nobility in administering to another's need out of one's fullness and plenty. (12)

He [Jesus] recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them. (21)

It is never to be forgotten that one of the ways by which men measure their own significance is to be found in the amount of power and energy other men must use in order to crush or hold them back. (27)

Anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny. (28)

There are few things more devastating than to have it burned into you that you do not count and that no provisions are made for the literal protection of your person. (39)

Anti-Semitism is a confession of a deep sense of inferiority and moral insecurity.  (44)

There are some things that are worse than death. To deny one's own integrity of personality in the presence of the human challenge is one of those things. (51)

The doom of the children is the greatest tragedy of the disinherited.  They are robbed of much of the careless rapture and spontaneous joy of merely being alive.  (54)

It ill behooves the man who is not forced to live in a ghetto to tell those who must how to transcend its limitations.  (56)

It may be argued that a man who place so high a price upon physical existence and survival that he is willing to perjure his own soul has a false, or at least an inadequate, sense of values.  (62)

The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated.  (65)

It is only when people live in an environment in which they are not required to exert supreme effort into just keeping alive that they seem to be able to select ends besides those of mere physical survival.  (69)

No man can fool God.  (71)

During times of war hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.  (74)