Quotes about Resistance

To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture.22

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.

The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So

Because of the fall of Adam and Eve and the natural sinfulness of the human heart that was passed onto all of us, there are those who will oppose God with all their strength. Paul was one of them. It was on his way to persecute believers in Jesus Christ that Jesus knocked him off his horse, blinded him, and spoke directly to him: "Saul! Saul! Why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4). Never, never, never give up on the person in your life who seems most opposed to the gospel.

If Jesus encountered demons and evil spirits during his lifetime his followers likewise may face them.

So the verse means, "Do not let the age in which you live force you into its scheme of thinking and behaving."

Oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition.

It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life - not fearing any authority on earth.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.