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But I was very unwilling to give up my belief;—I feel sure of this for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
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pages 86-87
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(The "abbreviated" version published in 1887 is presented above.)

 

Charles Darwin

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But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.

 

Charles Darwin

 

Father was moved to Hung Nam which was quite far from Pyongyang, together with that Mr. Kim. Father was taken to the police station on February 22nd, 1948 and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at the trial of April 7th. He moved to Hung Nam on May 20th. He found there that many prisoners were dying because of the poor food. The hard, forced labor raised the death rate. Father felt that he would not be able to survive for five years when he saw the contents of the meals. Father knew that Heavenly Father had worked on the Providence for 6,000 years, looking for one person: Father. (Father always thought of what would happen to Heavenly Father, who had worked His Providence for 6,000 years, if Father died.) You can imagine how difficult the mission of the Messiah is if I tell you this story. Father himself knew more than anyone else the difficulty of the Messiah's mission. Once he wondered whether he could transfer the mission to anybody else or not. If he could have transferred it, he himself might have found things easier, but that person would have had to walk the difficult way that Father was walking. So he changed his mind again and decided that he would like to bear the cross, rather than make someone else go this difficult course.

 

Sun Myung Moon

 

All we can say is that, as the result of a process which went on from the fourth century to about the eighth, a standard type of text was produced, which is found in the vast majority of the manuscripts that have come down to us. At least ninety-six per cent of the extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are later than the eighth century; and of those only a handful preserve traces of the other types of text which were in existence before the adoption of the standard text, and out of which it was created.

 

Frederic G. Kenyon

 

André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity.

 

Paul Halmos

 

We find upon all occasions, the early Christian writers speak of the Father as superior to the Son, and in general they give him the title of God, as distinguished from the Son; and sometimes they expressly call him, exclusively of the Son, the only true God; a phraseology which does not at all accord with the idea of the perfect equality of all the persons in the Trinity. But it might well be expected, that the advances to the present doctrine of the Trinity should be gradual and slow. It was, indeed, some centuries before it was completely formed.

 

Joseph Priestley