Quotes from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be *chosen* after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“As my son Frankie put it, Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm: They began - I am my shepherd. Then - Sheep are my shepherd. Then - Everything is my shepherd. Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“If we as Christians do not speak out as authoritarian governments grow from within or come from outside, eventually we or our children will be the enemy of society and the state. No truly authoritarian government can tolerate those who have real absolute by which to judge its arbitrary absolutes and who speak out and act upon that absolute.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind -- what they are in their thought-world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“For many, what they see on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in the external world. But this is not so, for one must never forget that every television and has been edited. The viewer does not see the event. He sees in edited form of the event. It is not the event which is seen, but an edited symbol or an edited image of the event. An aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up, which could not be totally the case, even if the people shooting the film were completely neutral.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“The ironic fact is that humanism which began with man's being central eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible's position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that person's dignity.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“Как только люди начали мыслить в этом направлении, больше не оставалось места для Бога и для человека как такового. Когда психология и социология стали частью закрытой причинно-следственной системы наравне с физикой, астрономией и химией, скончался не только Бог. Скончался человек. И в рамках этого мировоззрения умерла любовь. В пределах полностью закрытой причинно-следственной системы нет места для любви. В этой системе нет места для нравственности, в ней нет места для человеческой свободы. Человек превращается в нуль. Люди, вместе со всем, что они совершают, становятся частью механистической структуры.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, quote from How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

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Popular quotes

“What is music? What does it do to us? And why does it do to us what it does? People say that music has an uplifting effect on the soul: what rot! It isn’t true. It’s true that it has an effect, it has a terrible effect on me, at any rate, but it has nothing to do with any uplifting of the soul. Its effect on the soul is neither uplifting nor degrading — it merely irritates me.”
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― Natsuki Takaya, quote from Fruits Basket, Vol. 2

“But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman

“I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from A Man Without a Country

“One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass

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