Ronald Knox Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Only man has dignity; only man, therefore, can be funny.

Ronald Knox
When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal,
Corrected I believe to One does feel.

Ronald Knox
On babies:
A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Ronald Knox
All these riches, then, of her theology the Church has acquired, one might almost say, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind. She was so busy scrapping with the heretics that she wasn't conscious of saying anything she hadn't always said; and yet, when she had time to sit down and look about her, she found it took ten minutes to sing the Credo instead of three.

Ronald Knox
After all, what was a paradox but a statement of the obvious so as to make it sound untrue?

Ronald Knox
It doesn't do to say that heresy produces the development of doctrine, because that annoys the theologians. But it is true to say that as a matter of history the development of doctrine has been largely a reaction on the Church's part to the attacks of heresy.

Ronald Knox
I suppose there has been no subtler attack upon the Christian faith devised by its enemies in these last hundred years than the attack made in the name of "comparative religion". If you pick up a book on "Atonement", and plough your way through ideas of atonement among primitive tribes, pagan ideas of atonement, Jewish ideas of atonement, Christian ideas of atonement, you will find by the end of it that atonement, for the author's mind, has ceased to have any meaning. And he has been successful, in so far as he has managed to infect your mind with the wooliness which is the leading characteristic of his own. Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious.

Ronald Knox
Long before I had ever seen a ritualistic service I became a Ritualist.

Ronald Knox
If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism.

Ronald Knox
Thank God, in these days of enlightenment and establishment, everyone has a right to his own opinions, and chiefly to the opinion that nobody else has a right to theirs.

Ronald Knox
The prevailing attitude of the speakers was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the reader had not said.

Ronald Knox
It is stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation of it.

Ronald Knox
He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.

Ronald Knox
Evangelical vicar, in want of a portable, second-hand font, would dispose, for the same, of a portrait, in frame, of the Bishop, elect, of Vermont.
Advertisement placed in a newspaper

Ronald Knox
There once was a man who said: "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

Ronald Knox
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad;
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God.

Ronald Knox
Only those of us, I think, who were born under Queen Victoria know what it feels like to assume, without questioning, that England is permanently top nation, that foreigners do not matter, and that if the worst comes to the worst, Lord Salisbury will send a gunboat.

Ronald Knox
The great argument used now against any theological proposition is not, that it is untrue, or unthinkable, or unedifying, or unscriptural, or unorthodox, but simply, that the modern mind cannot accept it.

Ronald Knox
The tumult and the shouting dies,
The captains and the kings depart,
And we are left with large supplies
Of cold blancmange and rhubarb tart.

Ronald Knox