“I'm direct, I'm unpretentious and I'm pretty dogged, and I hope I've got a capacity to laugh at myself and not take myself too seriously.”
John Howard“We use the word cross in our hymns, in our piety, in our prayers, and in our pastoral language. But we use it too cheaply. We say that a person has to live with some sort of suffering in life: a sickness that cannot be cured, an unresolvable personality conflict within the family, poverty, or some other unexplainable or unchangeable suffering. Then we say, “That person has a cross to bear.” Granted, whatever kind of suffering we have is suffering that we can bear in confidence that God is with us. But the cross that Jesus had to face, because he chose to face it, was not—like sickness—something that strikes you without explanation. It was not some continuing difficulty in his social life. It was not an accident or catastrophe that just happened to hit him when it could have hit somebody else. Jesus’ cross was the price to pay for being the kind of person he was in the kind of world he was in; the cross that he chose was the price of his representing a new way of life in a world that did not want a new way of life. That is what he called his followers to do.”
John Howard Yoder, Radical Christian Discipleship“If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“I'm direct, I'm unpretentious and I'm pretty dogged, and I hope I've got a capacity to laugh at myself and not take myself too seriously.”
John Howard“Autumn...the year's last, loveliest s”
John Howard Bryant“To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.”
John Howard Griffin“They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white..., they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.”
John Howard Griffin“I'm annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me