17 Charles Colson Quotes

Charles Colson quotes

1. '[O]ne lesson I learned from Katrina is that we had better win the war on terror and resolve to prevent another 9-11. Katrina exposed how easy it would be to take a city out.' Many interpret this statment as a reference to Katrina being 'God's judgement to the United States for its sins,' though Colson has not made that claim.

2. 'Religious conservatives claim Katrina was God's omen, punishment for the United States', Media Matters for America, 13 September 2005

3. COLSON: 'Many think of (civil rights leader) King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative.....Were he alive today, I believe he would be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement and would be supporting Judge Alito.' [1]

4. I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Nixon.

5. If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

   Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

1. Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.

2. If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society.

3. Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.

4. Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is.

5. Frontline love. It is our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us.

6. The church has been brought into the same value system as the world: fame, success, materialism and celebrity. We watch the leading churches and the leading Christians for our cues. We want to emulate the best known preachers with the biggest sanctuaries and the grandest edifices. Preoccupation with these values has perverted the church's message.

7. In our day, you can mock religion in public and even get funds for doing it. But you can't show respect for religion in public - or you risk being hauled into court.

8. The average college graduate's proficient literacy in English [the ability to read lengthy, complex texts and draw complicated inferences] has declined from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent ten years later.

9. The church is the only institution supernaturally endowed by God. It is the one institution of which Jesus promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

10. Why, I wondered, is there such hostility to one faith in this Hindu culture that believes all roads lead to heaven? They should be the most tolerant of all. What is it about the Judeo-Christian message that makes it so offensive? Ironically, the Indians may understand the heart of the gospel - that Christ is King, with all that portends - better than many in the 'Christian' West.

11. I was deepening my understanding of what we call the cultural commission, the command to take dominion and bring righteousness to our culture.

12. Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture.