The worlds of folklore and religion were so mingled in early twentieth venture German culture that even families who didn't go to church were often deeply Christian.

Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionist, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

...when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.

He did not hope that God heard his prayers; he knew it.

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.

He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.

It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.