"You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."- John 8:32
"America's tragedy today is that while that motto adorns the university walls, for many people it no longer animates the mind."- Os Guinness
"Our challenge today is not to lament, protest, or simply talk about the crisis of truth in one of a hundred ways. Rather, it is to do something about it by becoming people of truth and learning to live free."
"Postmodernism, in fact, is the mirror image of modernism and is born of its deficiencies. It is therefore equally confused and equally confusing, but in a reverse way."
"If truth is truth, then differences make a difference — not just between truth and lies but between intimacy and alienation in relationships, between harmony and conflict in neighborhoods, between efficiency and incompetence in business, between reliability and fraud in science and journalism, between trust and suspicion in leadership, between freedom and tyranny in government, and even between life and death."
"When nothing can be judged except judgment itself— 'judgmentalism'—the barriers between the unthinkable, acceptable, and doable collapse entirely. And then, since life goes on and the sky doesn't fall, people draw the conclusion that the original concern was unfounded. Lighten up, the newly amoral say as they skip forward blithely, complicit in their own corruption."
"Right up to the end of the nineteenth century, the most important course in an American student's college career was moral philosophy, or what we today call ethics."
"Much of today's focus is on 'prevention ethics' rather than on principled ethics. It is more concerned with 'not being caught' (or sued or exposed in the press) than with doing right."
"What is seen as important are issues related to corporations, schools, courts, governments, and the treatment of the environment— not the individual's virtue and responsibility that underlie these secondary issues."
"The current ethics is often taught with a shallow view of human nature and an even more superficial view of evil in human society."
"The present preoccupation with ethics in elite intellectual centers has an element of absurdity because they have no moral content left to teach. The fruit of the Western universities in the last two hundred years has been to destroy the possibility of any moral knowledge on which to pursue moral formation."
"Few understand that the United States, because of the convictions of its founders, is a nation with a realistic view of evil embedded in its constitutional checks and balances."
"If 'God is dead,' all sorts of other things dies too, including truth, selfhood, character, the power of words to describe reality, and for some people even reality itself,"
"The costs of the moral vandalism are enormous, not least because the transgressors wreak their havoc in the name of specious freedom that others desire to copy."
"Whatever someone may profess, things are always other than they pretend, darker and murkier than they make out. Our proper response, we are taught, should be to view every claim with a sense of irony, interpret everything with suspicion, and pursue 'truth' and 'virtue' with the central agenda of unmasking and dismantling them."
"[No one should] conclude from [this] that such 'creative storytelling' is a monopoly of the left-wing. The range is inclusive—men, women, liberals, conservatives, serious writers, humorists, leaders, and ordinary people."
"The emphasis now is on surface, not depth; on possibilities, not equalities; on glamour, not convictions; on what can be altered endlessly; not achieved for good; and on what can be bought and won, not gained by education and formation."
"There are, of course, telltale fingerprints that postmodernism leaves on all it touches—the rejection of truth and objective standards of right and wrong, the leveling of authorities, the elevation of the autonomous self as the sole arbiter of life and reality, the equalizing of cultures, the promotion of image over character, the glorifying of power, the resort to victim-playing and identity politics, the licensing of victims' right to lie...and so on."
"For the postmodernist...there is no need for order, only liberty."
"Because of these obvious influences, observers have traced postmodernism's effect on various trends, ranging from sloppiness in dress ('The Age of No Class,' as the Washington Post has described it), to a serious coarsening of speech over the public airwaves, to a significant rise in scientific misconduct and fraud, to an increased 'literary license' in journalism, to the new 'liberation marketing' in advertising, and to a troubling rise of misrepresentation and accounting gimmicks in business."
"Just as iron filings are drawn to the strongest magnet, so minds weakened by a loss of truth are drawn to the most powerful positions."
"For the framers, what George Washington called the 'Great Experiment' meant the testing— and therefore confirming or disproving— of a specific, well-defined hypothesis about ordered liberty."
"If everything is endlessly open to question and change, then everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden, and literally nothing is unthinkable."
"Just as the Greeks entered Troy concealed in the hollow wooden statue of a horse, so post-modernism is providing the cover for all sorts of ideas and practices to enter American life—ideas that on their own would have difficulty gaining entrance."
"It is often said that to have a fulfilling life, three essentials are required: a clear sense of personal identity, a deep sense of faith and meaning, and a strong sense of purpose and mission."
"For those who find themselves without faith in God and who conclude that the world they desire does not fit with the world they discover, life is fundamentally deaf to their aspirations."
"We can easily be cowed into submission by the force of fashionability of new ideas without realizing their disastrous practical consequences for ordinary life. When that happens, the full answer to the problem in question must always include the theoretical answer. But practical arguments are an important first step in confronting the crisis."
"Those who put their faith in God do so for all sorts of good reasons, but the very best reason is that they are finally, utterly, and incontrovertibly convinced that the faith which they put their confidence in is true."
"Without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity."
"All truth is God's truth and is true everywhere, for everyone, under all conditions. Truth is true in the sense that it is objective and independent of the mind of any human knower. Being true, it cannot contradict itself."
"Human beings are truth-seekers by nature, and truth persuades by the forces of its own reality."
"The wilder and more dogmatic an argument is, the more important it is to argue against it on its own grounds."
"Applying to the skeptics the skepticism they apply to others [pushes] them out toward the negative consequences of their own beliefs."
"As human beings we are by nature truth-seekers; as fallen human beings we are also by nature truth-twisters. And a proper account of truth in the human project must do justice to both."
"Passion for truth is no guarantee of immunity from personal distortions in pursuing truth."
"It is impossible to experience love without being truthful, and it is impossible to discover truth without loving it."
"Conforming our desires to the truth is harder in the short term but easier in the long. We give up our need for control and submit to truth outside us which, if we were wrong about truth before, requires repentance rather than rationalization. We have to face up to reality rather than trying to fit reality into our schemes. But the long-term outcome is freedom because...truth is freedom and we are engaging with reality at it truly is."
"Although someone's beliefs and assumptions may not be true and do not describe reality, they will still drive their behavior. So if someone doesn't believe in truth, count on him to lie. If someone says there are no objective facts, expect her to be careless with facts to further her own interests. If someone explains everything by referring to evolution and the 'selfish gene,' be sure that at some point he will be extremely selfish on behalf of the fitness of his own survival."
"Modern life has simultaneously shifted from the country to the city, from the supremacy of words to the primacy of images, and from relatively static, face-to-face relationships to mobile, fleeting superficial contacts. In the process there has been a parallel shift of emphasis from the internal to the external, and thus from the 'strong character' so prized by traditional society to the 'striking personality' and 'successful image' so touted today."
"The lies of Western society— particularly as they are compounded by the 'culture cartel' of postmodern academia, advertising, entertainment, and youth culture— are more seductive and enduring than those of communist society."
"While all beliefs appear consistent to those who believe them, they always have one of two problems. They are either constricting or contradictory. In the first case the beliefs are more consistent but are incomplete in the sense that they are too small for the fullness of life...And in the second case the beliefs are more comprehensive but are inconsistent—which in the worst cases makes them self-refuting- a problem Chesterton calls 'the suicide of thought.'"
"What happens when we succeed in cutting away truth-claims to expose the web of power games only to find we have less power than the players we face? If truth is dead, right and wrong are neither, and all that remains is the will to power, then the conclusion is simple: Might makes right. Logic is only a power conspiracy. Victory goes to the strong, and the weak go to the wall."
"Truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it."
"While no argument is unarguable, some thoughts can be thought but not lived. So we should never stop halfway in dealing with skepticism but follow ideas uncompromisingly to their conclusion."
"It is that truth, like meaning as a whole, is not for to us to create but for us to discover. Each of us may be small, our lives short, and our influence puny. But if truth is there—objective, absolute, independent of minds that know it— then we may count on it."
"For all the fragile precariousness of our human existence on our tiny earth in the vastness of space, we may throw the whole weight of our existence on God, including our truth-seeking desires, because he is wholly true."
"The Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it is true. It is not true because we experience it; we experience it—deeply and gloriously—because it is true. It is not simply 'true for us'; it is true for any who seek in order to find."
"When it comes to truth, the outcome affects not only individuals but nations and even civilizations. What starts looking like a small abstract issue ends with titanic, public consequences for all who love freedom and justice."
"The more sophisticated the education, the more sophisticated the potential for rationalization. The sharper the mind, the slipperier the heart."
"Without truth, there is only manipulation."
"Without truth, journalism is only the rumor mill."
"The moral challenge that each of us has to face{is that] either we try to conform truth to our desires of reality, or we conform our desires to what truth and reality is. [We should] have the courage to shape our desires to the truth. There is reality; there is truth."
The vast majority of these quotes were gleaned from Dr. Os Guiness' book "Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin." It is an amazing read, and I highly recommend it! Check out my chapter-by-chapter review here.
