Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes
May 24, 1878 – October 5, 1969
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Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world — making the most of one's best.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— Statement of 1937 or earlier, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited by Herbert Victor Prochnow
Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— As quoted in Wisdom for Our Time (1961) by James Nelson
Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— Armistice Day sermon (11 November 1933), published in The Secret of Victorious Living (1934); also in I Renounce War : The Story of the Peace Pledge Union (1962) by Sybil Morrison
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— Statement made in 1935 or earlier, as quoted in The Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern (1937) by Burton Egbert Stevenson
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— As quoted in The Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern (1937) edited by Burton Egbert Stevenson
Peace is an awareness of reserves from beyond ourselves, so that our power is not so much in us as through us. Peace is the gift, not of volitional struggle, but of spiritual hospitality.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— On Being Fit to Live With : Sermons on Post-War Christianity (1946)
He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— As quoted in The Christian Herald (1969), Vol. 92, p. 72
Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— As quoted in He Came from Galilee (1974) by Parker B. Brown
To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— As quoted in Don't Try to Live Your Life in One Day! (2008) by Johnny Ong, p. 171
Hating people is like burning down your own home to get rid of a rat.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— Variant: Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— A very similar statement has become attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but apparently only in recent decades: "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle." This seems to have been first attributed to Franklin in The New Age Magazine Vol. 66 (1958), and the earliest appearance of it yet located is in Coronet magazine, Vol. 34 (1953), p. 27, where it was attributed to a Louise Stein.
He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.
Harry Emerson Fosdick— Harry Emerson Fosdick, Living Under Tension (1941), p. 111
