We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching in many ways, but the true secret will be found in the lack of urgent prayer for God's presence in the power of the Holy Spirit.
I want any excuse to come home. My dad is not a spring chicken any more. If anyone says, 'Go buy a postage stamp in London,' I'll go and do it.
Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.
Climate change is not an excuse to silence political speech.
Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.
Being in a band you can wear whatever you want - it's like an excuse for Halloween every day.
I am all for cracking down on inappropriate digital behaviour. Too often the connected world is an excuse for some coward hiding behind a keyboard to bully someone else.
I saw the government really using the excuse of a weak economy and a financial crisis to create more government and to push onto the American entrepreneurial society more and more restraints and government activity.
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Sometimes, life is unfair, and you have to suck it up and move on and not use it as an excuse.
As you get older, you don't really have any excuse to be stupid anymore, to be in the dark.
I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.
If companies can refuse to provide coverage for women, what other objections to the Affordable Care Act will we see based on 'religious grounds'? For that matter, will 'religious freedom' be used as an excuse to discriminate against other minorities and disenfranchised groups across the board? Where will it end?
Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old.
A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.
President Obama likes to say Guantanamo Bay is a terrorist recruiting tool, and while that may be an easy excuse, it's simply not true. The reality is the motivations of radical Islamic jihadism existed before Guantanamo Bay. The ideology is premised on a narrative of conquest, in the spiritual as well as the earthly world.
The fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.
The world used us as an excuse to go mad.
The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.
Being a parent does not give you an excuse for bad manners.
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.
Scripture is filled with examples of men and women whom God used late in life, often with great impact - men and women who refused to use old age as an excuse to ignore what God wanted them to do.
There is much in the result of John Chilcot's seven-year inquiry into the decision-making that led to Britain's involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that can be cited to excuse headlines that refer to his findings as 'scathing' and 'damning.'
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
However, don't let perfectionism become an excuse for never getting started.
One of the most difficult things for people who have been successful in sports is adapting to the daily world where you can't get an answer from someone until 5 o'clock tomorrow. There is always an excuse. Living 40 or 50 years like that doesn't get too exciting after a while.
Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?
There's no excuse for rudeness.
My mother had abandoned the family, so grandmother raised me. And she was instrumental in that she taught me that the world is a glorious place. She taught me to embrace humanity. And she'd say there's never an excuse for joy. And to be thankful.
I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.
My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.
And now, excuse me while I interrupt myself.
There's no excuse in a technological age where we've got drones - you know, overhead, and we can monitor anything, all sorts of minutia - that we can't track living flesh-and-blood children.
The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.
