Top 35 Lionel Blue Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.”

— Lionel Blue

2. “To change, to convert? Why bother?”

— Lionel Blue

3. “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

4. “This Christian poison hasn’t stopped yet.”

— Lionel Blue

5. “An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!”

— Lionel Blue

6. “I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.”

— Lionel Blue

7. “Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.”

— Lionel Blue

8. “For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.”

— Lionel Blue

9. “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

10. “I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.”

— Lionel Blue

11. “When you do a good turn you feel rich, even if you are broke.”

— Lionel Blue

12. “I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.”

— Lionel Blue

13. “The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.”

— Lionel Blue

14. “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

15. “I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.”

— Lionel Blue

16. “For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.”

— Lionel Blue

17. “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

18. “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

19. “The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.”

— Lionel Blue

20. “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

21. “If a dish doesn’t turn out right, change the name and don’t bat an eyelid. A fallen souffle is only a risen omelette. It depends on the self-confidence with which you present it.”

— Lionel Blue

22. “For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.”

— Lionel Blue

23. “Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.”

— Lionel Blue

24. “I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul’s plusses.”

— Lionel Blue

25. “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

26. “I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.”

— Lionel Blue

27. “I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.”

— Lionel Blue

28. “In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.”

— Lionel Blue

29. “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

30. “I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.”

— Lionel Blue

31. “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

32. “What would I have done if I’d been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.”

— Lionel Blue

33. “I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.”

— Lionel Blue

34. “On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.”

— Lionel Blue

35. “It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.”

— Lionel Blue