We are watching a civilization decide whether it still believes in moral truth at all. A culture that abandons virtue for outcomes, truth for narrative, and conscience for consensus does not drift gently into decline; it slides into something colder and harder, where power masquerades as compassion and coercion is baptized as care. Once “fairness” replaces goodness, literally anything becomes permissible in its name.
Michael Smith, A Civilization Losing Its Moral Compass
Truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.
Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 to AD 430)
The antidote to indoctrination is to tell the truth, expose people to the lies that would deceive them, show them how to refute this lies, and prepare them with the thinking skills necessary to continue resisting falsehoods.
Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 9
It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him.
Thomas Jefferson (1785)
None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet and playwright; 1749-1832)
A primary reason secularists are gentler in their treatment of other religions is that most seem odd and foreign, so that Americans are prone to regard them as merely ethnic and cultural customs. As a result, they pose no threat to the secularist agenda. The reason Christianity is dangerous is that a good number of Americans actually believe it, and offer its teachings on human nature, the family, the state, and so on, as a basis for civil society. Clearly, their views must be debunked as irrational superstition.
David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, pg. 337-338
Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39
Do we not care about what is true? Are we afraid to look reality in the eye because it may take us in a direction we don’t want to go? I believe this is one of the great flaws in our human character. We stubbornly hold on to our beliefs because they generally reflect how we want life to be rather than how life actually is. For this reason, evidence does not seem to matter.
Richard E. Simmons III, Reflections on the Existence of God, pg. 7
A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.
Alfred Tennyson.
Cited by Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale, Jesus Among Secular Gods, pg.208
