Quotes About Resistance

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.

Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story"—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—"was our story too. Tolkien's dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.

To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes.

Create Small Fortresses of Memory Figes's observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, they knew they could subdue the country by superior force of arms. But Hitler's plan for Poland was to destroy the Poles as a people. To do that, the Nazis needed to destroy the two things that gave the Polish their identity: their shared Catholic faith and their sense of themselves as a nation.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing goes against it," said G. K. Chesterton.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing goes against it," said G. K. Chesterton. That

The old, hard totalitarianism had a vision for the world that required the eradication of Christianity. The new, soft totalitarianism does too, and we are not equipped to resist its sneakier attack. As we know, communism was militantly atheistic and declared religion to be its mortal enemy. The Soviets and their European allies murdered clergy and cast an uncounted number of believers, both ordained and lay, into prisons and work camps, where many suffered torture.

It's no accident that every dictatorship always tries to break down the family, because it's in the family that you get the strength to be able to fight," says Maria Komaromi...

The truth has power to end every tyranny.

La cultura popular tiene una fuerza de disolución que requiere un esfuerzo ímprobo de los individuos y las familias que quieran hacerle frente por su cuenta. En los tiempos que corren, adherirnos a una comunidad estable de fe es una necesidad.

Romaszewska is fierce on the subject of, well, solidarity. She sees the danger of soft totalitarianism coming fast, and urges young people to get off the internet and get together face-to-face to build resistance

If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, then the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order.

The sickness of humanity is only added to, when people begin things that others are trying to stop

They found themselves up against the new satraps sent to the region by the victorious Artaxerxes.

To make an example of them, Alexander had them sent back to Macedonia in chains

I tell ya one thing about me. I say "No" to drugs. When people ask me for some of my drugs, I say "No.

The more we try to avoid an experience, the more we ensure its return.

That's exactly how it is in yoga. The places where you have the most resistance are actually the places that are going to be the areas of the greatest liberation.

la guillotina seca»,

Quiere imponer su mundo y evitar que haya cambios.

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labors...then surely it is a braver, a saner and truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

Traditional Arminian theology says that in and through the cross of Christ the sin of Adam inherited by all was forgiven (Romans 5) so that people are only condemnable for their own sins. The cross completely removes every obstacle to every human being's salvation except their own resistance to God's freely offered grace, which is given to all in some measure but especially through the preaching of the Word.