Charles Colson Quotes

You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.

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.

Remain at your post and do your duty - for the glory of God and His kingdom.

God doesn't want our success; He wants us. He doesn't demand our achievements; He demands our obedience.

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

The Bible's historical accuracy is a reminder that while "the heavens declare the glory of God," there's also plenty of evidence among the rubble and ruins.

Our society's obsession with tolerance leads to intolerance. Simply being a Christian today is an offense to our culture.

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

What is true has never been a question to be decided by polls or popular opinion. Truth isn’t ‘democratic’—it’s something that God has written into the very fabric of nature.

In college, [Christian students] are assaulted by secular relativism, and if we don't prepare them, they will be like lambs led to slaughter.

In our day, you can mock religion in public and even get funds for doing it. But you can't show respect for religion in public - or you risk being hauled into court.

... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.

What we do flows from who we are.

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

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.

Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

Heroism is an extraordinary feat of the flesh; holiness is an ordinary act of the spirit. One may bring personal glory; the other always gives God glory.

Few things are so deadly as a misguided sense of compassion.

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

Redeeming culture is the never ending mission of the church.

Christians are called to redeem entire cultures, not just individuals.

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

We must be the same person in private and in public. Only the Christian worldview gives us the basis for this kind of integrity.

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.

True tolerance is not a total lack of judgment. It's knowing what should be tolerated, and refusing to tolerate that which shouldn't.

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

If our culture is to be transformed, it will happen from the bottom up - from ordinary believers practicing apologetics over the backyard fence or around the barbecue grill.

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.

The first 20 stories written about a public figure set the tone for the next 2,000 and it is almost impossible to reverse it.

Culture is religion incarnate.

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

Judeo-Christian revelation is not the negative influence secularists proclaim it to be. Rather, it is the taproot of our civilization.

Hostility to religion is having an effect. In 1963, the number of Americans who said that they believed the Bible is literally true was 65%. Today, the number has dropped to 32%.

Removing religious symbols from public places is not neutrality. On the contrary, it sends a highly negative message - that religion is something shameful, embarrassing, or at best strictly private.

If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society.

God is truth and is to be worshiped, not because it's convenient, makes us feel good, or is therapeutic.

Nearly every grave moral failure begins with a small sin.

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.

We should always pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should always act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves.

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.

God uses prisons to train people for future roles of leadership or martyrdom.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

Who speaks for God? He does quite nicely for Himself. Through His holy and infallible Word - and the quiet obedience of His servants.

I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.

The Bible-banned, burned, beloved-is more widely read and more frequently attacked than any other book in history.

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

The church does not draw people in; it sends them out.

I do not believe one can experience conversion or the fullness of the Christian life apart from the church.

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.