Os Guinness > Quotes

“the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others. Still”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Much of the greatness of the human spirit can be seen in our passionate pursuit of knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, perfection, and love. At the same time, few things are so haunting as the stories of the very greatest seekers falling short. Leonardo da Vinci's magnificent failures point to a very personal entry point to the wonder of calling - when something more than human seeking is needed if seeking is to be satisfied, then calling means that seekers themselves are sought.”
― Os Guinness, The Call

“The truth is that, properly understood, confession is a key strength of the Christian faith and a vital part of countering hypocrisy. For a start, open, voluntary confession is part and parcel of a strong and comprehensive view of truth, and therefore of realism and responsibility. Whatever we do and have done, whether right or wrong, is a matter of record and reality. Responsibly owning up to it therefore aligns us to reality and to truth in a way that liberates. And far from being weak or an act of surrender, confession is the expression of rare moral courage, for in confessing a person demonstrates the strength of character to go on record against himself or herself.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“God is the God of truth. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. The Scriptures are the truth. The gospel is the word of truth. Conversion is a turnaround triggered by truth. Discipleship is the way of life that is living in truth. Confession is a realignment with the truth. Spiritual growth is life formation through the power of the Spirit of truth. And the Last Judgment is the final vindication and restoration of truth for humanity and for the very cosmos itself.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Once commonly called “atomism,” the genealogy of atheism can be traced all the way back through the Enlightenment to Roman poets such as Lucretius and his poem De Rerum Natura, and behind that to Greek philosophers such as Epicurus and Democritus and their philosophy of atomism. It was precisely such a philosophy that contributed to the classical world a strong sense of fate and the futility of both life and human purpose. And it also provided the dark setting against which the brilliance of the hope of the good news of Jesus shone by contrast—as soon it will once again.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. WILLIAM HAZLITT”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Name-calling, insult, ridicule, guilt by association, caricature, innuendo, accusation, denunciation, negative ads, and deceptive and manipulative videos have replaced deliberation and debate. Neither side talks to the other side, only about them; and there is no pretence of democratic engagement, let alone a serious effort at persuasion.”
― Os Guinness, The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It

“The modern world is highly secular in certain parts, and nowhere more than in the world of the educated elites. Such people are notoriously “tone deaf” and their natural habitat is “a world without windows,” as Weber and Berger have described them.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“the modern world has scrambled things so badly that today we worship our work, we work at our play, and we play at our worship.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“The truth is that the greatest enemy of the Western church is not the state or any ideology such as atheism, but the world and the spirit of the age. Anything less than a full-blooded expression of the Christian faith has no chance of standing firm against the assaults and seductions of the advanced modern world. So when the church becomes worldly, she betrays her Lord, and she also fails to live up to her calling to be dangerously different and thus to provide deliverance from the world by a power that is not of the world.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“Money rather than monarchy and plutocracy rather than theocracy are the chief threats to republicanism today.”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“Yale philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes, “One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Our task is to focus on our individual callings in engaging with the world, to trust that others are following theirs too, and to leave to God the masterminding of the grand outcome.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“America cannot endure permanently half 1776 and half 1789. The compromises, contradictions, hypocrisies, inequities, and evils have built up unaddressed. The grapes of wrath have ripened again, and the choice before America is plain. Either America goes forward best by going back first, or America is about to reap a future in which the worst will once again be the corruption of the best.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that “the way of a fool is right in his own eyes” (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Somehow we human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“Yet if the gross national product measures all of this, there is much that it does not include. It measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, nor the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it. ROBERT F. KENNEDY, KANSAS CITY, 1968”
― Os Guinness, Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat

“In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, "It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be." His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: "Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama."6 That”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“The Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it is true.”
― Os Guinness, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt

“The Genesis declaration carries the central truth that each human person is a precious individual, whether strong or weak, rich or poor, able-bodied or handicapped, intellectually brilliant or limited, beautiful or plain.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today’s world. All that counts is appearance, and the world of consumerism has lost no time in catering to every need, and then creating even more, in this burgeoning market of the appearance.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“The world finds itself torn between the two great bookends of human history, authoritarianism and anarchy. Authoritarianism is the world of order and stability without freedom...Anarchy, on the other hand, is the world of freedom without order and stability...The present challenge is to establish genuine personal freedom and substantially free societies in a generation that pays lip service to freedom while all the time it is pulled toward one or the other of the extremes.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“Appreciation for history is scarce today, public debate is only rarely lit by foundational principles, and there is a further reason why the needed discussion fails to get off the ground—especially in the speech code, cancel culture of many American and European universities. Debate is often ended by prejudice and a fashionable consensus that chokes it off from the start.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“Our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, to make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments, and to seek to do all this in a manner that is true to the gospel itself.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35
But”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“Whatever people may feel about themselves, however humans may treat their fellow humans, and whichever human view of humanity may be dominant in one generation or another, or one society or another, God has made his position clear. He has created human beings in his image, and each one must therefore be seen and treated as unique, precious and the bearer of dignity and worth that is inalienable.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“Power can fence us in, but only sacrificial love can find us out. Power can win when we are ranged against it, but it cannot win us. Such is the hard, tenacious, willful, festering core of sin at the heart of each one of us that only the equally deliberate, tenacious love disguised in the absurd powerlessness, shame, pain, loneliness and desolation of the cross—all for us—could reach us and subvert us. There was no other way. It takes the full folly and weakness of the cross to find us out and win us back.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY The opposition which Christianity has to encounter is no longer confined to special doctrines or to points of supposed conflict with the natural sciences, . . . but extends to the whole manner of conceiving the world, and of man’s place in it, the manner of conceiving the entire system of things, natural and moral, of which we form a part. It is no longer an opposition of detail, but of principle. This circumstance necessitates an equal extension of the line of defense. It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can most successfully be met.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Either we may seek to conform our desires to the truth, which leads to conviction, or we may seek to conform the truth to our desires, which leads to evasion.”
― Os Guinness, Long Journey Home : A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life