Quotes about Exclusivity

The root meaning of the Old Testament word for holiness is the idea of being separate—different and separated from the ordinary. And when applied to God, this separateness implies that he is in a class by himself. He is like a one-of-a-kind diamond, supremely valuable. We can use the word transcendent for this kind of divine separateness. He is so uniquely separate that he transcends all other reality. He is above it and more valuable than all of it.

Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate. By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists.

I fear it's because religion is man's attempt to reach God, and when he feels he has succeeded, he cannot abide anyone else's claim to have done the same.

I don't. I don't want anybody else to touch you. I'm silly. I get furious if they touch you.

I cannot understand the almost exclusive emphasis on racial integration, when in fact we are getting more and more segregated into tight little cliques on age grounds.

He wants you all to Himself to put His loving, divine arms around you.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.

Do you think none shall be saved but puritans(89)?

It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction.

gospel that has as its chief message avoiding hell or not sinning will never be the full story. A gospel that repeatedly, narrowly affirms and bolsters the "in-ness" of one group at the expense of the "out-ness" of another group will not be true to the story that includes "all things and people in heaven and on earth.

And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn't- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that's in?