These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

-  Abigail Adams

But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.

- John Adams

Anti-intellectualism gives rise to the most extreme, the most morally deplorable, form of sloth. It is to be found in persons for whom the ultimate objectives in life are the maximization of pleasure, money, fame, or power and who, thus motivated, express their contempt for those who waste their lives in purely intellectual pursuits. It is almost as if they wished they did not have the burden of having intellects that might distract them from their fanatical devotion to nonintellectual aims.

- Mortimer Adler

A “presupposition” is not just any assumption in an argument, but a personal commitment that is held at the most basic level of one’s network of beliefs. Presuppositions form a wide-ranging, foundational perspective (or starting point) in terms of which everything else is interpreted and evaluated. As such, presuppositions have the greatest authority in one’s thinking, being treated as one’s least negotiable beliefs and being granted the highest immunity to revision.

- Greg Bahnsen

Of the human nature there is a dual unfolding: in the individual, human nature unfolds itself into personality; in the race human nature unfolds itself into many individuals, which in turn together constitute a unity, a personality, just as Christ and the church constitute one full-grown man… The fact that the mind illumined by God’s revelation, is able to find in the realm of nature traces of that God whom it learned to know from Scripture as being triune in his existence and works cannot be summarily denied… The thoughtful person places the doctrine of the trinity in the very center of the full-orbed life of nature and mankind.

- Herman Bavinck

Christianity does not introduce a single substantial foreign element into the creation. It restores what was corrupted by sin. It atones for the guilty and cures what is sick; the wounded it heals.

- Herman Bavinck

A prime mark of the Christian mind is that it cultivates the eternal perspective. That is to say, it looks beyond this life to another one. It is supernaturally orientated, and brings to bear upon earthly considerations the fact of Heaven and the fact of Hell.

- Harry Blamires

It is commonplace that the mind of modern man has been secularized. For instance, it has been deprived of any orientation towards the supernatural. Tragic as this fact is, it would not be so desperately tragic had the Christian mind held out against the secular drift. But unfortunately the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church.

- Harry Blamires

The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.

- Frederick Buechner

The Princetonians insisted on the inseparable relationship between right doctrine and right living. They believed that the objective and subjective dimensions of the Christian faith must never be separated and, indeed rightly, cannot be separated.

- David Calhoun

All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.

- John Calvin

Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating Him to scrutinize himself.

- John Calvin

There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

- G. K. Chesterton

Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in about fifteen years. … Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover.

- G. K. Chesterton

That is the message we need to press home to our friends and to our impressionable kids. They need to know that everyone embraces one philosophy or another-a worldview that defines his or her conception of the world, of reality, and of human life. These beliefs are woven into movies-often in subtle ways that viewers miss. That is why it's so important that we teach our kids how to find the worldview message in every film.

- Chuck Colson

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

- Albert Einstein

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not a stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

- T. S. Eliot

Christianity hides in its womb a much greater treasure of rejuvenation than you suspect. Until now it has exerted its power only on individual people and only indirectly on the state. But anyone, whether believer or unbeliever, who has been able to detect its hidden power, must grant that Christianity can also exert a wonderful organizing power on society; and not till this power bursts through will the religion of the cross shine before the whole world in all the depths of its conception and in all the wealth of the blessings which it brings.

- Johann Fichte

They that know God will be humble; they that know themselves cannot be proud.  

- John Flavel

Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind. Living in a sensuous culture and an increasingly emotional democracy, American evangelicals in the last generation have simultaneously toned up their bodies and dumbed down their minds. The result? Many suffer from a modern form of what the ancient stoics called "mental hedonism"-having fit bodies but fat minds.

- Os Guinness

 Without a feel for the social dimension of believing, the church is like a person paralyzed from the neck down – quite insensible to the further damage being inflicted on her.

- Os Guinness

Christians simply haven't developed Christian tools of analysis to examine culture properly. Or rather, the tools the church once had have grown rusty or been mislaid. What often happens is that Christians wake up to some incident or issue and suddenly realize they need to analyze what's going on. Then, having no tools of their own, they lean across and borrow the tools nearest them.

They don't realize that, in their haste, they are borrowing not an isolated tool but a whole philosophical toolbox laden with tools which have their own particular bias to every problem (a Trojan horse in the toolbox, if you like). The toolbox may be Freudian, Hindu or Marxist. Occasionally, the toolbox is right-wing; more often today it is liberal or left-wing (the former mainly in North America, the latter mainly in Europe). Rarely - and this is all that matters to us - is it consistently or coherently Christian.

When Christians use tools for analysis (or bandy certain terms of description) which have non-Christian assumptions embedded within them, these tools (and terms) eventually act back on them like wearing someone else's glasses or walking in someone else's shoes. The tools shape the user. Their recent failure to think critically about culture has made Christians uniquely susceptible to this.

- Os Guinness

At the center of every worldview is what might be called the “touchstone proposition” of that worldview, a proposition that is held to be the fundamental truth about reality and serves as a criterion to determine which other propositions may or may not count as candidates for belief.

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

No one truth is rightly held till it is clearly conceived and stated, and no single truth is adequately comprehended till it is viewed in harmonious relations to all the other truths of the system of which Christ is the centre.

- A. A. Hodge

We are to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel -- and to dare, to do, and to suffer. 

- Mark Hopkins

Conflict, says he, is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and others--these ancient twins are built into mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what, pray, kin such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: They are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. 

- Falcon in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas. 

- Paul Johnson

The ideas of economist and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.  Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

- John Maynard Keynes

When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

- Abraham Kuyper

The curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it, and instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life.

- Abraham Kuyper

There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, "This is mine! This belongs to me!"

- Abraham Kuyper

It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.

- Screwtape to Wormwood in C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world - and might even be more difficult to save.

- C. S. Lewis

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

- C. S. Lewis

… a cultural life will exist outside the church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now - not to be able to meet enemies on their own ground - would be to throw down our weapons, and betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.

- C. S. Lewis

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest expression every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I might be confessing Christ. 

- Martin Luther

Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.

- J. Gresham Machen

What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.

- J. Gresham Machen

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

- J. Gresham Machen

Furthermore, the field of Christianity is the world. The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of all connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations, but also all of human thought. The Christian, therefore, cannot be indifferent to any branch of earnest human endeavor. It must all be brought into some relation to the gospel. It must be studied either in order to be demonstrated as false, or else in order to be made useful in advancing the Kingdom of God.

- J. Gresham Machen

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough.

- Charles Malik

The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out you have actually lost the world.

- Charles Malik

Smart-alecky speech doesn't even work. It may win applause, but it does not win hearts. It hardens the person who feels targeted, because he feels mocked and misrepresented. It increases bad feeling and anger. No one changed his mind on an issue because he was humiliated into it. In fact, we are misguided even to think of our opponents in the 'culture wars' as enemies in the first place. They are not our enemies, but hostages of the Enemy. We have a common Enemy who seeks to destroy us both, by locking them in confusion and by luring us to self-righteous pomposity.

- Federica Mathewes-Green

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is not purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. 

- Thomas Merton

One of Kuyper's … themes is his idea of "sphere sovereignty." God, he insisted, built into the creation a variety of cultural spheres, such as the family, economics, politics, art, and intellectual inquiry. Each of these spheres has its own proper "business" and needs its own unique pattern of authority. When we confuse spheres, by violating the proper boundaries of church and state, for instance, or reducing the academic life to a business enterprise, we trangress the patterns that God has set.

- Richard J. Mouw

To endorse a common grace theology is to learn to live with some theological messiness. This ought not to trouble Calvinists, for whom the experience of theological messiness should be a healthy reminder of the ways in which all of our theological probings will eventually bring us to a humble acknowledgement of the divine mysteries.

- Richard J. Mouw

Everything happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us and the art of life is to get the message.

- Malcolm Muggeridge

Few Americans have been taught to think in terms of worldviews. They do not know what a worldview is; they could not spell out the content of their own worldview if their lives depended upon it; they are unaware of how various aspects of conflicting worldviews clash logically.

- Ronald Nash

Traditional Christian teaching has been otherworldly in its emphasis. It has had more to say about how to accept failure than about how to succeed, more about suffering than about action. Theology has been the preserve of those who minister as priests and pastors to the inner spiritual life of their people. Consequently, when theologians whose whole work is in this pastoral ministry try to speak about matters of politics and economics, their words do not carry weight.

- Lesslie Newbigin

The church... is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God's kingship.

- Lesslie Newbigin

Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

- Flannery O'Connor

- Blaise Pascal

- J.I. Packer

I need not warn you, I am sure, of the dangers of over acculturation. We know what happened to some of the mainline Protestant denominations who are attuned to the opinion polls, so to speak, and trim their sails accordingly as the winds of culture shift. Instead of serving as the yeast which leavens the cultural lump, they tend to disappear in the culture. By remaining faithful to its original commission, by serving people with love, especially the poor, the lonely and the dispossessed, and by not surrendering its doctrinal steadfastness, sometimes even the very contradiction of culture by which it serves as a sign, surely the Church serves culture best.

- Walker Percy

So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centres of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world.

- Michael Polanyi

Because we are commanded by God to form and reform culture, Christians have to be actively engaged with culture: studying it, discerning positive and negative aspects, and working to redeem it. We are to be in the world but not of it, working to restrain evil and advance redemptive potentials. We are called to be salt in the world, working to enrich culture and preserve life-affirming aspects. We are also called to be a light to show the way for cultural development, uncovering and disentangling forces for good and evil, and redirecting unhealthy or destructive patterns toward principles in line with loving God and serving our neighbor. And the culture we are called to form and reform, to move toward redemption, includes even popular culture.

- William D. Romanowski

- Bertrand Russell

All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendency over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided.

- Russell Kirk

"Realistic people" who pursue "practical aims" are rarely as realistic or practical, in the long run of life, as the dreamers who pursue their dreams.

- Hans Selye

In order to confront modern man truly [the Christian] must not have the dichotomy.

- Francis Schaeffer

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Do not pursue what is illusory -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even is stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

- Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard

Men no longer are bound together by ideas, but by interests; and it would seem as if human opinions were reduced to a wort of intellectual
dust, scattered on every side, unable to collect, unable to cohere.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places, but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

- J. R. R. Tolkien

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians – when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity – and possibly nowhere else

- Sheldon Vanauken

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

- Voltaire

These same truths may be so received that they beget in us a living religion, they must be: first, revealed in an authoritative word; second, apprehended by a sound intellect; and third, experienced in an instructed heart. Only as the three unite, then, can we have a vital religion.

- B. B. Warfield

Those who have not discovered that worldview is the most important thing about a man… should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably… the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is not escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.

- Richard Weaver

- Bernard Williams

At the very moment when the modern world is mangling those whom it blesses, disordering their inner lives even as it smothers them in plenty, and rubbing its own nerves raw in its bumbling efforts to address its most painful and destructive problems – at this very moment, evangelicalism has bought cultural acceptability by emptying itself of serious thought, serious theology, serious worship, and serious practice in the larger culture. And most evangelicals appear to be completely oblivious to this sellout.

- David Wells

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

- Woodrow Wilson

The church needs scholars to assist her in the task of seeing precisely how the biblical vision applies to our present social realities and to assist her in the task of interpreting this social reality of ours.

- Nicholas Wolterstorff

The gospel is not a set of techniques for making people Christians. Nor is it a set of systematic theological reflections, however important. The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is Lord-Lord of the world, Lord of the cosmos, Lord of the earth, of the ozone layer, of whales and waterfalls, and of trees and tortoises. And as soon as we get this right we destroy in a stroke the disastrous dichotomy that has existed in people's minds.

- N. T. Wright