Pete Stark's Quotes

Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

We are a long way from getting back the jobs lost since President Bush took office.

You little fruitcake, you little fruitcake, I said you are a fruitcake.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

It is time we had a defense budget that lives within its means, accounts for what is truly required in Iraq and provides the best possible support for all our troops.

A whole lot of Americans have never met a Mormon.

America is an unusually religious nation.

American churches work very hard at reaching out to people to bring them in.

Can anyone seriously imagine a society without stable families? Maybe we should raise all the kids in state orphanages.

Every minister knows it's harder to get the guys to church than the women. We ought to be asking why this is.

For one, thing, the media are dominated by the irreligious. So are universities.

It can be demonstrated that in any society there is a distribution of religious tastes and concerns.

It seems that not being religious is a form of risk-taking, consistent with other patterns of short-sighted behaviour in men.

The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress.

The more members of the clergy that are out there working to expand their congregations, the more people will go to church.

Those who belong to megachurches display as high a level of personal commitment as do those who attend small congregations.

Wherever you've got a state church, you have empty churches.

Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.

High testosterone levels have been proven to make men more likely to commit crimes. The tendency in men toward risky behaviour keeps turning up even where socialization is different, and so does crime and delinquency.

Leading Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas were not what today might be called 'strict constructionists.' Rather, they celebrated reason as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions.

Many people who say they have no religion are simply saying they have no official religious affiliation. They may actually have strong personal beliefs.

Mormons are an extraordinarily educated and professional population. They have all these virtues: They work hard, don't skip school, have no scandals. Consequently, you find them in a lot of consequential places.

Most churches are run by preachers who went to seminaries, who decided to be preachers when they were 18, 19, 20 years old. These preachers never met a payroll. They don't know how the world works.

Regular church-goers are substantially more likely than non-attenders to read, to take newspapers and magazines, to listen to classical music, to attend symphony concerts, operas, and stage plays.

The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand.

The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it's the reverse.