Quotes from Os Guinness

When a friend told Francis Bacon that he would prefer not to have an eternal soul than to live in eternal torment, the painter replied with a grim realism that people are "so attracted to their egos that they'd probably rather have the torment than simple annihilation.

To most people at the time it was unthinkable that religion might ever not be what it was then. However, Bryce mused, if religion in America were ever to lose its strength and authority, the result would be "the completest revolution of all." The strongest bonding in American society would have gone, and unbounded freedom would run amok and work to cause its own undoing.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

This book focuses on a narrower issue and a simple problem: We have lost the art of Christian persuasion and we must recover it.

Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply.

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.

Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.

We have pointed to the way of Jesus, and then through our behavior we have stood squarely in the path of anyone who might like to join it. Plainly, there is a time in our arguments to confess, and confession and changed lives have to be a key part of our arguments. When it comes our responding to hypocrisy, words will never be enough.

For anyone who understands freedom, it is simply inescapable that freedom requires truth, a shared sense of truth, and therefore trustworthiness and trust.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Rochefoucauld's maxim

Pascal and his brilliant exposition in Pensées. "I have often said," Pascal wrote, "that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room."46

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.