Conviction Memorable Quotes

On the day of my conviction I memorize my inmate number my crime my time On the day of my conviction I forget my school ID number my top three colleges my class schedule

In the spring of 1519, the Bishop of Coventry received word that certain families were teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in English. The bishop ordered the arrest of Mr. Hatchets, Mr. Archer, Mr. Hawkins, Mr. Bond, Mr. Wrigsham, Mr. Landsdale and Mrs. Smith. While they were held at an abbey outside of town, their children were brought to Greyfriar’s Monastery in Coventry. The boys and girls were made to stand before Friar Stafford, the abbot. One by one, Stafford interrogated the children about their parents’ beliefs. “Now then,” he told them, “I charge you in the name of God to tell me the whole truth—you shall suffer severely for any lies you tell or secrets you conceal.” “What do you believe about the church and the way to heaven?” he asked them. “Do you go to the services of the parish church? Do you read the Scriptures in English? Do you memorize the Lord’s Prayer or other Scriptures in English?” After getting from the children’s own lips the information he needed to convict their parents, he warned them. “Your parents are heretics!” he bellowed. “They have led you away from the teachings of the church. You are never to meddle again with the Lord’s Prayer or the Ten Commandments or any other Scriptures in English. And if you do—rest assured you will burn at the stake for it!” The next day, the six fathers and Mrs. Smith stood before a panel of judges that included the bishop and Friar Stafford. After presenting the evidence against them—and because the men had been warned before by the bishop not to persist in their Lollard ways—the men were condemned to death by burning. But since this was Mrs. Smith’s first offense, the court dismissed her with a warning not to teach her children the Scriptures in English anymore under pain of death. It was late in the evening when the court dismissed, so the bishop’s assistant decided to see Mrs. Smith home in the dark. As they walked out into the night, he took her arm to lead her across the street. Hearing the rattling of papers within her sleeve, he stopped and said, “Well, what do you have here?” He grabbed her arm, reached into the sleeve and pulled out a little scroll. Under the light of a lantern, he read it and found that it contained handwritten in English the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostle’s Creed. “Well, well,” he said with a sneer. “Come now, this is as good a time as any!” He dragged her back again to the bishop. The panel quickly sentenced her to be burned with the six condemned men and sent her off to prison to await her fate. A few days later, guards led Mrs. Smith and the Lollard men to an open space in the center of Coventry known as Little Park. They tied them to a stake and burned them to death for the crime of teaching their children the Word of God in English.

And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” Galatians 5:24-25 If we love the Lord, we will put down the flesh and our own will to live for God’s. Walking in the Spirit is not something we do automatically. We walk in the Spirit when we hear the Holy Spirit’s voice and convictions and obey. We can’t hear Him unless we incline our ears to Him. We must be diligent to draw near to Him and seek His voice all day every day. Thereby we will walk in the Spirit and please the Lord.

Paul tells us: “because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (1 Thessalonians 1:4 – 5). The gospel they believed and received wasn’t just a theological construct or a churchy platitude. Sure, it came through spoken and written words, and it was preached, taught, and shared. But it also came in power. Often Christians are either “word” people or “power” people. On the one hand, we may lean toward a rationalized Christianity. This type of Christianity holds to the gospel Word without gospel power. It preaches, teaches, catechizes, studies, memorizes, and shares the word but with little effect. It possesses “wise and persuasive words” but not “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). This kind of Christianity can master systematic, biblical, and historical theology without being mastered by Christ. It can identify idols but remains powerless to address their power. Why? Because it replaces the power of the Spirit with the power of knowledge. On the other hand, there is an equal danger in spiritualized Christianity. Such Christianity prays, sings, shouts, and claims victory over a lost world without lifting a finger to share God’s gospel. It is not enough to pray for power; we must proclaim God’s Word. The power of the Spirit works through the proclaimed Word. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. My pastor during college, Tom Nelson, always said: “Don’t just stand on a shovel and pray for a hole.” Spiritualized Christianity tends to stand and pray, emphasizing private or emotional experiences with God. What we need is prayer and proclamation, power and Word. The Thessalonians had word and power, they grew in understanding and experience, but they also had full conviction. It is not enough to have spiritual power and good theology. These must also be coupled with faith, an active embrace of God’s promises in Christ, which brings about conviction. Full conviction comes when we are set free from false forms of security and experience Spirit-empowered faith in the word of Christ. It springs from genuine encounter with Christ. Full conviction transcends intellectual doubt and emotional experiences, and in the silence of persecution it says: “Christ is enough.” True security, deep security, comes through the reasonable, powerful, Christ-centered conviction that Jesus is enough, not only for us but for the world. When we falter, the church is present to exhort, encourage, and pray for one another to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts. May we toss out the penny stocks of the fear of man to invest deeply in the limitless riches of Christ.

Winston Churchill was once asked to deliver a commencement speech to the boys of an old private school,” he continued, “and his message was memorable for both its truth and its brevity. The great British prime minister approached the podium, faced his audience and said: ‘This is the lesson: never give in, never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

La Tata’s eyes conjuring a memorized motherly anger, the same anger brought on her by her sick mother, by the vecinas, by her patronizing sisters, an anger spilling out of every single mother, a rehearsed womanly conviction, a learned frown, hands arched on hips, pursed lips, eyes vaguely shut vibrating to the rhythm of the vocal cords—the posture of every Colombian mother, a hologram passed on through generations to land on the next girl’s body in a Now you are gonna tell me ahora mismito where carajos are you getting all that money y ay Myriam del Socorro Juan that you lie to me. Y agárrate muela picá que lo que viene es candela. Myriam

It was a nice kiss. Very... memorable. If he came near me with that look again, I'd hit him upside the head and claim self-defense. No jury in the world would convict me.

Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.

Sexual selection usually behaves like an insanely greedy tabloid newspaper editor who deletes all news and leaves only advertisements. In human evolution, it is as if the editor suddenly recognized a niche market for news in a few big-brained readers. She told all her reporters she wanted wall-to-wall news, but she never bothered to set up a fact-checking department. Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.

The Kansas conservatives, it seems to me, can be divided into two basic groups. On one side are the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington, or the eviction of God from public space. These kinds of Con will throw themselves under the wheels of an abortion doctor’s car; they will go door-to-door and spend their life savings for their causes; they will agitate, educate, and organize with a conviction that anyone who believes in democracy has to admire. On the other side are the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions. Many of them once aspired to join—maybe even did join—the state’s moderate Republican insider club. Rising up that way, however, would take years, maybe a lifetime, when by mouthing some easily memorized God-talk and changing their position on abortion—as Brownback2 and other leading Cons have done—they could instantly have a movement at their back, complete with superdedicated campaign workers they wouldn’t have to pay and a national network of pundits and think tanks and talk-show hosts ready to plug them in. Kansas’s bright young Republicans know which way

Religion is often too inflexible to incorporate new information, like human evolution or a heliocentric solar system, so it demands that followers shut out reality. Judeo-Christianity’s attempt to keep the information loop closed is evident in the demands the biblical god makes in the Ten Commandments: no other gods before me, do not disrespect even my name, stop work for a full day to worship me, heed your parents because they will tell you to worship me, killing is acceptable if the victim is not someone who worships me, and finally, a decree to suppress certain thoughts. The very concept of the Judeo-Christian god encapsulates thoughtcrime. He is, as Christopher Hitchens so memorably phrased it, “an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thoughtcrime while you are asleep, who can subject you—who must, indeed, subject you—to a total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life…before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?”43

In five tries he had not had one permanent success. Every one of his escapes (from Sweet Home, from Brandywine, from Alfred, Georgia, from Wilmington, from Northpoint) had been frustrated. Alone, undisguised, with visible skin, memorable hair and no whiteman to protect him, he never stayed uncaught. The longest had been when he ran with the convicts, stayed with the Cherokee, followed their advice and lived in hiding with the weaver woman in Wilmington, Delaware: three years. And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and lowlying rivers. Or just a house---solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it.

Affirmations should always be stated as a positive. Affirm what you do want, not what you don’t want. Affirmations work best when they are short and very clear about a single desired goal. Take the time to write, rewrite, and polish your affirmation until you can express your desire in a short statement of precise and well-chosen words. Affirmations should be specific about the desired goal, but not about how to accomplish it. Your subconscious knows better than you what it can do and how it can do it. Do not make unreasonable time demands. Your subconscious can’t make anything happen “suddenly” or “now.” Just saying the words will have little effect. When you affirm your desire you must do it with such faith and conviction that your subconscious becomes convinced of how important it is to you. As you affirm your desire to yourself, visualize it in your mind’s eye as big as a billboard. Make it big, powerful, and memorable. Repetition of your emotionalized affirmation is crucial.