THE LIMITS TO LEGAL PROTECTION

'The belief that as sex worker will be helped by the criminalisation of her trade rests on the assumption that she has other choices available to her - that it is prostitution, rather than, say, poverty or immigration law, that is her fundamental problem.. Likewise the, the belief that incarceration is the way to deal with domestic violence does not take into account the women whose fates are bound up with the men who perpetrate it: the women who are financially dependent on the men who beat them, and who have a large stake in how the men in their communities are treated by the police, courts or prison.'

Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex, p.162.

THE CHURCH AS THE ANSWER TO CHRISTIANITY'S CREDIBILITY PROBLEM

'How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.'

Lesslie Newbiggin in Belousek, Marriage, Scripture and the Church, p.290.

WHAT GOD DESIRES

'God's desire for us is that we should live in him.'
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p.18.

WHY I'M AN EVANGELICAL

'My sincerely held belief as an evangelical is that it is my very loyalty to Christ which requires me to hold evangelical views.'

John Stott, But I Say To You..., p.202.

PARENTING THE VIRTUES

'As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbour and self-denial ; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.151.

EVERY DAY RELATIONSHIPS

'Human relationships have to be rediscovered and reinvented every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbour is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.150.

FINDING THE RIGHT PERSON

And we leave home and go to live with this person for ever; not because we are sure that he is the right person: in fact we are not entirely sure, and we can always suspect the right person for us is hiding away goodness knows where in the city. But we don't want to know where he is hiding; we feel that we have by now very little to say to him, because we say everything to this person - who is not perhaps the right person - with whom we now live; and we want to receive the good and the evil of our lives from this person and with him Every now and then violent differences between us and this person erupt into the open; and yet they are unable to destroy the infinite peace we have within us. After many years, only after many years, after a thick web of habits, memories and violent differences has been woven between us, we at last realise that he is, in truth, the right person for us, that we could have put up with anyone else, that it is only from him that we can ask everything that the heart needs.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtus, p.140.

ADOLESCENCE

'We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible it us; intelligible, but of not interest because we longer care whether peace reigns in the house or not. Now we are able to follow the ins and outs of family rows and to foresee their course and how long they will last; and we are are not afraid of them any more, doors slam ad we do not jump. The house is no longer what it was for us before, it is no longer the point from which we look out on the rest of the universe, it is a place where - by chance - we eat and live: we eat quickly, lending our inattentive ear to the adults' conversation - a conversation which is intelligible to us but which strikes us as useless; eat and quickly escape to our rooms so that we don't have to listen to their useless conversation, and we are able to be perfectly happy even if the adults around us are arguing and sulking day in day out. The things that matter to us no longer happen within the walls of our house but outside, in the street and at school; we feel that we cannot be happy if the other children at school look down on us in any way. We would do anything to escape their contempt; and we do anything.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.121.

THE PROBLEM OF OUR RELATIONSHIPS

'The problem of our relationships with other human beings lies at the centre of our life: as soo as we become aware of this - that is, as soon as we clearly see it as a problem and no longer as the muddle of unhappiness, we start to look for its origins, and to reconstruct its course throughout our whole life.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.119.

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS NOT NATURAL

'When we go to be psychoanalysed we are told that we must stop hating ourselves so violently. But in order to free us from this hatred, free us from this guilt, this feeling of panic, this silence, we are told we must live according to nature, that we must indulge our instincts, that we must follow our desires: that we must make a free choice of our lives. But to make a free choice of your life is not to live according to nature; it is to live unnaturally, because man is not always given a free choice; he does not choose the hour of his birth, or his face, or his parents, or his childhood; he does not normally choose the hour of his death. A man has no choice but to accept his destiny: and the only choice he is permitted is the choice between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between truth and lies.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.115.

A TEST OF REAL FRIENDSHIP

'...a friendship which, like all real friendships, has passed through the fire of violent disagreements.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.xvii.

SCRIPTURE & TRADITION

'The history of the church is a history of debate in which the truths of the Bible have been been successively defined so as to exclude the opinions of those who have questioned, obscured or denied them.'

John Stott, But I Say To You...Christ the Controversialist, p.35.