Martin Rees Quotes

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.

It is more than a book, it is an institution which rules the Christian world.

I won't say that the papers misquote me, but I sometimes wonder where Christianity would be today if some of those reporters had been Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

You don't have to be a Fundamentalist Christian to be interested in the Bible. It's really a fascinating mythology.

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.

No other single influence has had so great an impact on this earth as the life of Jesus the Christ.

The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

I have a really great relationship with God. I pray. I read the Bible.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

In requiring this candor and simplicity of mind in those who would investigate the truth of our religion, Christianity demands nothing more than is readily conceded to every branch of human science.

Christianity, with or without its whole apparatus of dogma, will endure in its essence for thousands of years after us; there will always be spiritually-minded people who will be ennobled by it, and some made great.

Most buildings, whether they're Gothic cathedrals or Romanesque ones, were high tech for their time.

I definitely consider myself a Christian. There's things that I believe in, there's things I have a self-belief on. I know I got a great relationship with God and the universe. I just believe in being a righteous person and karma. Doing unto others as you would have done unto you. I really want to help teach that.

It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.

They're not posing as being Jesus Christ all the time.

The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.

It is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.

I think there is a great deal of interest still in the Christian faith.

Ireland was, of old, called the Isle of Saints because of the great number of holy ones of both sexes who flourished there in former ages or who, coming thence, propagated the faith amongst other nations.

Christianity, of course, but why journalism?

I could hardly be called a pillar of the [Anglican] Church. I am more in the nature of a buttress, for I support it from the outside.

Thou hast signified to us, indeed, most beloved son in Christ, that thou dost desire to enter into the island of Ireland, in order to subject the people to the laws and to extirpate the vices that have there taken root, and that thou art willing to pay an annual pension to St. Peter of one penny from every house, and to preserve the rights of the churches in that land inviolate and entire. We, therefore, seconding with the favor it deserves thy pious and laudable desire, and granting a benignant assent to thy petition, are well pleased that, for the enlargement of the bounds of the church. for the restraint of vice, for the correction of morals and the introduction of virtues, for the advancement of the Christian religion, thou shouldst enter that island, and carry out there the things that look to the honor of God and to its own salvation. And may the people of that land receive thee with honor, and venerate thee as their master; provided always that the rights of the churches remain inviolate and entire, and saving to St. Peter and the holy Roman Church the annual pension of one penny from each house. If, therefore, thou dost see fit to complete what thou hast conceived in thy mind, strive to imbue that people with good morals, and bring it to pass, as well through thyself as through those whom thou dost know from their faith, doctrine, and course of life to be fit for such a work, that the church may there be adorned, the Christian religion planted and made to grow, and the things which pertain to the honour of God and to salvation be so ordered that thou may'st merit to obtain an abundant and lasting reward from God, and on earth a name glorious throughout the ages.