Charles Colson Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

You are called not to be successful or to meet any of the other counterfeit standards of this world, but to be faithful and to be expended in the cause of serving the risen and returning Christ.

Charles Colson
Today's marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview.

Charles Colson
Some labeled Jerry Falwell an American version of the Ayatollah Khomeni. People for the American Way, a group organized to counter the Moral Majority, launched a slick media campaign attaching the Nazi slur to the religious right.

Charles Colson
The problem is that relativism provides no sure foundation for a safe and orderly society.

Charles Colson
Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.

Charles Colson
Frontline love. It is our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us.

Charles Colson
The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

Charles Colson
Why, I wondered, is there such hostility to one faith in this Hindu culture that believes all roads lead to heaven? They should be the most tolerant of all. What is it about the Judeo-Christian message that makes it so offensive? Ironically, the Indians may understand the heart of the gospel - that Christ is King, with all that portends - better than many in the 'Christian' West.

Charles Colson
Today's widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do only in the privacy of their homes or churches would have been unimaginable to the founders of the republic - even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith.

Charles Colson
People who reject transcendent authority can no longer persuade one another through rational arguments; everything is reduced to personal opinion. Debates about ideas thus degenerate into power struggles; we're left with no moral standard by which to measure the common good. For that matter, how can there be a 'common good' without an objective standard of truth?

Charles Colson
Power is like saltwater; the more you drink, the thirstier you get.

Charles Colson
Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is.

Charles Colson
The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the bad news of the conviction of sin before it can be the Good News of redemption. The truth is revealed in God's Holy Word; life can be lived only in absolute and disciplined submission to its authority.

Charles Colson
The Bible's power rests upon the fact that it is the reliable, errorless, and infallible Word of God.

Charles Colson
To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living.

Charles Colson
Repentance is replete with radical implications for a fundamental change of mind not only turns us from the sinful past, but also transforms our life plan, ethics, and actions as we begin to see the world through God's eyes rather than ours. That kind of transformation requires the ultimate surrender of self.

Charles Colson
Our culture has forgotten what the Founders knew: The American experiment is a moral, not just a political, exercise.

Charles Colson
We Americans think we enjoy self-government. We have all the trappings of self-government, like elections. But in reality, we have gradually lost many of our rights to govern ourselves. We have the form of self-government, but only some of the substance. We are, in a sense, a nation run by a handful of judges who often enforce, not the law, but their personal opinions.

Charles Colson
The Bible has, amazingly- no doubt with supernatural grace-survived its critics. The harder tyrants try to eliminate it and skeptics dismiss it, the better read it becomes.

Charles Colson
God is dead not because He doesn't exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn't.

Charles Colson
The BIBLE - banned, burned, beloved. More widely read, more frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted to discredit it, dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who read it. Yet soldiers carry it into battle believing it more powerful than their weapons. Fragments of it smuggled into solitary prison cells have transformed ruthless killers into gentle saints

Charles Colson
A government cannot be truly just without affirming the intrinsic value of human life.

Charles Colson
Many think of (civil rights leader) King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative.... Were he alive today, I believe he would be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement and would be supporting Judge Alito.

Charles Colson
Knowing that we are fulfilling God's purpose is the only thing that gives rest to the restless human heart.

Charles Colson
I would walk over my grandmother if necessary [to get something done].

Charles Colson
Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.

Charles Colson
The true mark of a Christian leader is trying to build up other people. Raise up other leaders!

Charles Colson
Tolerance once meant that we could use our reason to discern good and evil in open debate. Today tolerance has been used to call good evil and evil good.

Charles Colson
It is not what we do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through us. God doesn't want our success; He wants us. He doesn't demand our achievements; He demands our obedience. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of paradox, where through the ugly defeat of a cross, a holy God is utterly glorified. Victory comes through defeat; healing through brokenness; finding self through losing self.

Charles Colson
People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well

Charles Colson