I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn’t been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly. – Lionel Blue
I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can’t be learnt in lecture halls. – Lionel Blue
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God. – Lionel Blue
I didn’t want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn’t want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs. – Lionel Blue
Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again. – Lionel Blue
To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn’t wish my teens and 20s on my enemies. – Lionel Blue
The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians. – Lionel Blue
The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs. – Lionel Blue
The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge. – Lionel Blue
Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic. – Lionel Blue
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen. – Lionel Blue
I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn’t have to go very far to pick up their know-how. – Lionel Blue
For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be. – Lionel Blue
My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I’ve begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I’ve had it good and am crumbling nicely. – Lionel Blue
Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther. – Lionel Blue
Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity. – Lionel Blue
At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming. – Lionel Blue
My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston. – Lionel Blue
During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school. – Lionel Blue
I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay. – Lionel Blue
Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life. – Lionel Blue
I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get. – Lionel Blue
