A Quote by Krister Stendahl

Humor, together with irony,forms a safeguard against idolatry.

Krister Stendahl

Quote Topics

Against Forms Humor Idolatry Irony Safeguard Together

Quote Author

Krister Stendahl
April 21, 1921 - April 15, 2008

As I write, I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style.

Enrique Vila-Matas

I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.

Eve Ensler

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

Jessamyn West

All Canadians stand together united against any forms of violence, terror against Canadians, and, in fact, against anyone around the world.

Jagmeet Singh

Given the sin of impiety through which they [the Romans] sinned against the divine nature [by idolatry], the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed.... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies [by idolatry] the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil.

Thomas Aquinas

The irony or humor of my pieces is never really calculated, but they somehow always end up that way. Humor, especially when dealing with matters of extreme gravity, has a way of toppling set ideas and opening up new modes of interpretation. Furthermore, adding humor tends to shift the power balance.

Larissa Sansour

I call that church free which enters into the covenant with the ultimate source of existence. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority.

James Luther Adams

A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

Susan Sontag

Humor comes in all forms, and everyone has their cup of tea about what makes them laugh. But the day we censor humor is a sad one for sure.

Marlee Matlin

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.

Heinrich Böll

The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.

Walter Lippmann

There are a still lot of people in today's church who can easily identify the idolatry outside the church and are pretty proud of the fact that they are not like them. And yet, we are far too slow to recognize the idolatry inside the church and more painfully, the idolatry inside our hearts.

Tullian Tchividjian

It is time to cease to argue about God , and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry.

Erich Fromm

How the Idolatry of Christian Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Takes Two General Forms

Joe Carter

I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.