Quotes from Os Guinness

Culturally, one of the best arguments we can make is, wait and see.

Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.

Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.

Calling is a 'yes' to God that carries a 'no' to the chaos of modern demands. Calling is the key to tracing the story line of our lives and unriddling the meaning of our existence in a chaotic world.

We may be in the dark about what God is *doing*, but we are not in the dark about God.

Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God's (primary) calling.

Christ is the only way to God, but there are as many ways to Christ as there are people who come to Him.

God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.

Too often we forget that the great men of faith reached the heights they did only by going through the depths.

In terms of distance, the prodigal's pigsty is the farthest point from home; in terms of time, the pigsty is the shortest distance to the father's house.

The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.

A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.

Augustine says that you don't understand a nation by the throw weight of its military or the strength of its research universities or the size of its population, but by looking at what it loves in common. To assess a nation, you look at the health and strength of its ideals. And there's no question that the common love in America is freedom.

There are lots of people depending on the government who are good, honest citizens who have worked all their lives.

Negative freedom is freedom from - freedom from oppression, whether it's a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that's what's routinely ignored today.

The Christian church in the U.S. is still strong numerically, but it has lost its decisive influence both in American public life and in American culture as a whole, especially in the major elite institutions of society.

As I understand the American Founders, the most brilliant and daring idea they had was that it's possible to create a free society that could stay free forever.

Beyond any question, the way the American founders consistently linked faith and freedom, republicanism and religion, was not only deliberate and thoughtful, it was also surprising and anything but routine.

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.

Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.

We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.

Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.