John Shelby Spong Quotes
The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
Quotes to Explore
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My second-grade teacher went around the class and asked everybody what they were going to be when they grew up. I said, 'I want to travel the world,' and he said, 'You'll be married and pregnant by 21, just like all the girls in this room.'
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If you are a girl dressing up in the morning thinking about the whole world having a point of view on what you are wearing, it takes the pleasure out of getting dressed.
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In terms of my involvement in 'don't ask, don't tell' and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools - these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.
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I have been fighting climate change for two decades, and people often ask me how I remain hopeful in the face of extreme weather and grim forecasts. The answer is simple: I see countless solutions spreading across the nation and across the world. But we need more investment.
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So many songs are just a wink to the audience, but people take them seriously. 'My Humps?' C'mon!
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As an artist, I can't be responsible for how people interpret material.
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I consider the world, this Earth, to be like a school, and our life the classrooms.
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I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
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If you've been in a film that's seen by millions and millions and millions of people, you're more likely to be recognized for that than for your theater performances, which were seen by considerably less people. Why would I get upset by that?
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Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.
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It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.
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It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.
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What could a smartphone do for me that would make people go out and buy another one?
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I wanted to inspire people not to work under a bamboo ceiling. Whatever you are - yellow, black, white, brown - you don't have to allow your skin to define who you are or how you operate your business. There's not one face to anything.
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It's not the people in the South who create racial problems - it's the people who are governing.
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I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn't really going out and seeing people.
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My house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people.
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The reality is the world is a really, really big place, and there's a lot of people running around with a lot on their mind. And you really have to figure out how to build a company that can put on a message that can actually reach people and have an impact globally.
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People don't appreciate their intestines until something goes wrong. But I always hope that people gain a little appreciation for their guts.
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I hated when Rafael said he hated himself. Sometimes he would say something like that. I just didn’t like hearing that. Why would he want to hate himself? Okay, people don’t really want to hate themselves. I get that. It comes from somewhere deep inside and getting to that place is hard as hell. I get that too. This is my theory: the people who shouldn’t hate themselves, do hate themselves. And the people who should hate themselves, don’t hate themselves. The world is all backwards. See, this is one of the many reasons why God and I are not good friends.
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Acting is just a part of my life, and I like to lead life on my terms.
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Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
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Learning, undigested by thought, is labor lost.
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The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
