1. “Their founder [Jesus] taught them that they should be like brothers to one another, and therefore they despise their own privacy and view their possessions as common property.” -Lucian of Samosata, early opponent of Christianity2. “The impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their poor, but ours as well.” -Emperor Julian of Rome3. “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the coming one. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven.” -C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"4. “The Revelation has 404 verses. In those 404 verses, there are 518 references to earlier scripture. If we are not familiar with the preceding writings, quite obviously we are not going to understand the Revelation. John has his favorite books of scripture: Ezekiel, Daniel, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Isaiah, Exodus. But there is probably not a single canonical Old Testament book to which he doesn’t make at least some allusion.” -Eugene Peterson, "Reversed Thunder"5. “Throughout this book, as in much of the Bible, the sea is the dark force of chaos which threatens God’s plans and God’s people. It is the element from which the first monster emerged. It is contained in Genesis by God, ‘contained’, that is, both in the sense that it is there as part of the furniture and in the sense that its boundary is strictly limited. Evil is only allowed to do enough to overreach itself and to bring about its own downfall. But in the new creation there will be no more sea, no more chaos, no place from which monsters might again emerge.” -N.T. Wright, "Revelation For Everyone"6. “This sung faith served to deepen the capacity of the slaves for endurance and their ability to absorb their suffering, and it taught a people how to ride high in life, how to look squarely in the face those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope, and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that their environment with all its cruelty could not crush. This enabled them to reject annihilation and affirm a terrible right to live.” -Howard Thurman, "The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death"7. “There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Return of the King"