Rousas John Rushdoony Quotes & Sayings

We are very much in need now of Christian pioneers. This means a people who are zealous to grow and to exercise dominion in Christ. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Our progress in the past usually came slowly, and our recovery will come slowly. It will come as men, each in their sphere of action, begin the task of reconstruction. Reconstruction begins with our lives and God's grace; it extends to our vocations, our institutions' homes, and society' Life and progress are made up of a great number of little things; we cover a mile by small steps, and the surest move forward is that small step rather than a giant day dream. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Children are no longer seen by many people as a blessing from God but as extensions of personal goals and pride. As a result, the family under humanism is in a state of crisis. — Rousas John Rushdoony

According to Scripture, it was not man's flesh that fell into sin, but the whole man. The doctrine of total depravity means that the extent of the Fall is total, that every aspect of man's being is tainted by sin, and that the root of it is the 'heart' of man, in his mind, nature and being. To seek refuge in the spirit to escape from the flesh is to seek sanctity in the capitol of sin, for it was and is man's desire to be as God, to be his own god, determining good and evil for himself, which is the essence of original sin (Gen. 3:5). The ascetic quest thus took refuge in sin from sin! It flew from the suburbs of temptation into the central city of sin and was then bewildered to find the enemy there. — Rousas John Rushdoony

It is significant that, as innocent babies are killed, and capital punishment is withheld from their murderers, the same men who plead for the murderer's life also demand the "right" to abortion. Usually, the same picketers that carry a sign one day, "Abolish Capital Punishment," also carry "Legalize Abortion" another day. When this is called to their attention, their answer is, "There is no contradiction involved." They are right: the thesis is "condemn the innocent and free the guilty. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Law is good, proper, and essential in its place, but law can save no man, nor can law remake man and society. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Man as an Idea in neoplatonist religion is again an abstraction, less a monster and more a bad joke. The religious idea of man is of a bodiless being who works to undo his flesh, deny his appetites, and to rise above the ordinary requirements of the body. This abstraction has a horror of the material world as a kind of fatal allure seeking to corrupt his soul. But no man finds himself more beset by lust than the man who tries to deny he is a man. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Our character is revealed under pressure. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Godly men are not revolutionists: the Lord's way is regeneration, not revolution. — Rousas John Rushdoony

If God be denied, then His sovereignty and infallibility accrue to other agencies. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Thus, the sons of Plato proclaim "the death of God," i.e., the God of Scripture, because He refuses to exist in terms of their definition. It does not greatly trouble them to proclaim God dead; in fact, the supposed funeral is their celebration. The "death" of the God of Scripture, however, requires the death of the man created in His image, and, as a result, "the death of God" society seeks then to destroy historical man, the real man of time, in order to create a new man in terms of their idea and purpose.

Man as an Idea in philosophy and sociology is an inhuman abstraction; he is a monster who neither exists nor can exist. — Rousas John Rushdoony

It is the fear of God which gives us the confidence to face men and their evil and to be confident of ultimate victory. — Rousas John Rushdoony

People who expect the world to end very soon, and are planning on being raptured out of it, are not likely to be concerned about dominion over the earth, nor the application of God's law to the whole of life. Moreover, if such people believe, as they do, that Satan rules the world, they will regard their responsibilities to the world as negligible, and the world as something to escape from. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Anthropologist John Greenway has observed, Never in the entire history of the inevitable displacement of hunting tribes by advanced agriculturalists in the forty thousand generations of mankind has a native people been treated with more consideration, decency, and kindliness than the American Indians. The Mongoloids in displacing the first comers to Asia, the Negroes in displacing the aborigines in Africa, and every other group following the biological law of the Competitive Exclusion Principle thought like the Polynesian chief who once observed to a white officer, "I don't understand you English. You come here and take our land and then you spend the rest of your lives trying to make up for it. When my people came to these islands, we just killed the inhabitants and that was the end of it."[3] — Rousas John Rushdoony

The purpose of Christian education is not academic: it is religious and practical. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Socialism is politicized envy. — Rousas John Rushdoony

To be fearless in the Lord does not require us to be great and powerful men, but only to believe in the great and powerful God. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Humanism believes in salvation by works of law. By vast appropriations of money, and dedicated labor, [it] is trying to save all nations and races, all men from all problems, in the hopes of creating paradise on earth. [It] is trying to bring peace on earth and goodwill among men by acts of state and works of law, not by Jesus Christ. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Our increasingly humanistic laws, courts and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us, as they strike down laws resting upon biblical foundations, that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality, but salvation by law. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The question which haunts the dialectical culture is this: how to have unity without totally undifferentiated and meaningless oneness? If all things are basically one, the differences are meaningless, divisions false, and definitions are sophistications, in that the tyranny, or destiny, of oneness is the truth of all being. But, if all things are basically many, and if plurality is ultimate, then the world dissolves into unrelated particulars and becomes, as some thinkers insist, not a universe but a multiverse, and every atom is in a sense its own law and being. The first leads to the breakdown of differences and the liberty of atomistic individualism and particularity; the second is the breakdown of fundamental law into nihilism and the retreat of men and their arts into isolated and private universes — Rousas John Rushdoony

Man lives in time but his life transcends time. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The Lord supplies our needs, but not our selfishness — Rousas John Rushdoony

History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith. — Rousas John Rushdoony

To control the future requires the control of education and of the child. Hence, for Christians to tolerate statist education, or to allow their children to be trained thereby, means to renounce power in society, to renounce their children, and to deny Christ's Lordship over all of life. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather then relative terms. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Life is rarely easy, but, with Christ our King, it is always good. — Rousas John Rushdoony

It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Our basic problem today is that we have two religions in conflict, humanism and Christianity, each with its own morality and the laws of that morality. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Freedom in the Biblical sense is always at a price; it is a costly gift, and it requires great things of us. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Only in the biblical revelation is the tension between law and love resolved, with vast social and historical implications, in the person and work of Jesus Christ. By His perfect righteousness and His vicarious atonement, the strictest requirements of law and justice were fully met and fulfilled, and the statutes of God observed to every jot and tittle, and yet, at one and the same time, the love of God unto salvation was manifested in and through Him. The cross thus is the symbol of the unity of law and love in Jesus Christ and of the full requirement and mutual integrity of both. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Before the rise of Deism, Calvin condemned the pragmatic deism which relegated God to heaven and left the government of the world to men. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The end of an age is always a time of turmoil, war, economic catastrophe, cynicism, lawlessness and distress. But it is also an era of heightened challenge and creativity, of issues, and their world-wide scope, never has an era faced a more demanding and exciting crisis. This then, above all else, is the great and glorious era to live in, a time of of opportunity, one requiring fresh and vigorous thinking, indeed, a glorious time to be alive. — Rousas John Rushdoony

It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man. — Rousas John Rushdoony

For Dewey, the Great Community was the basic fact of history. The individual and the soul were invalid concepts, man was truly man, not as an individual, but as after Aristotle, in society and supremely in the State. Thus, for Dewey, true education mean not the development of the individual in terms of learning, but his socialization.
Progressive education ... educates the individual in terms of particular facts of the universe without reference to God, truth, or morality. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The precondition of giving thanks with sincerity is always humility. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The Bible is God's law-word which must govern every sphere of life and thought. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The resurrection of the body forbids us to despise the material realm. — Rousas John Rushdoony

There can be no good character in civil government if there is none in the people. You cannot make a good omelet with bad eggs. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Because the world is God's creation and law order, it is the truth which in time shall prevail and triumph. — Rousas John Rushdoony

God has a plan for the conquest of all things by His covenant people. That plan is His law. It leaves no area of life and activity untouched, and it predestines victory. To deny the law is to deny God and His plan for victory. — Rousas John Rushdoony

In any age, our problems are a result of sin, and the solution is faith and obedience. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The doctrine of vocation or calling gained currency as men began to take time and history seriously. If the goal of the Christian life is a neoplatonic flight from this world, then pietism has effectively undermined the doctrine of non-ecclesiastical callings. To speak of having a calling is usually to speak of the clergy and clerical office. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The result of becoming tolerant towards sin is that we become intolerant towards God and His Word. — Rousas John Rushdoony

We sin if we do not confront sin as sin. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The University of Timbuktu never existed. The only thing that existed in Timbuktu was a small mud hut. — Rousas John Rushdoony

All too many churchmen view the undisciplined & amoral products of statist education as evidences of the failure of these schools. On the contrary, they are evidences of their success. — Rousas John Rushdoony

We are getting what we paid for, and if we want something else, we are going to have to pay for it, in work, sweat, and sacrifice. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Our Lord tells us that the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27): it is a witness to our creatureliness, to the fact that we can rest because the government of all things is not on our shoulders, and our Lord is King over all creation. — Rousas John Rushdoony

We cannot use our thoughts and feelings as a standard: only God's Word is the test. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The family is the world's greatest welfare agency, and the most successful. What the federal government has done in welfare is small and trifling compared to what the families of America do daily, caring for their own, relieving family distresses, providing medical care and education for one another, and so on. No civil government could begin to finance what the families underwrite daily. The family's welfare program, for all its failures from time to time, is proportionately the world's most successful operation by an incomparable margin. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The basic function of law is to restrain (Rom. 13:1-4) not to regenerate, and when the function of the law is changed from the restraint of evil to the regeneration of man and society, then law itself begins to break down, because an impossible burden is being placed upon it ... Only as we return to a Biblical foundation for law shall we again have a return to justice and order under law. — Rousas John Rushdoony

We may disagree with the morality of a law, but we cannot deny the moral concern of a law. — Rousas John Rushdoony

People do not avoid the Bible because it is difficult to understand as much as because what they understand condemns their conscience and throws light on dark corners in their lives which they prefer to keep dark. — Rousas John Rushdoony

As we grow in grace, we become a blessing to the world around us, and the world, in terms of its relations to us, is blessed or cursed. This means that the politics of the world capitols, however important, is not as determinative of the future as the faithfulness of the covenant people to their God and to His covenant law-word. When history wallows needlessly in the seas of politics, it is simply because the rudder of the ship, the Christian, is giving no direction and is neither a curse nor a blessing, only salt which has lost its savor and is good for nothing except to be thrown out on the road of history, "to be trodden under foot of men" (Matt. 5:13). — Rousas John Rushdoony

Problems are a part of life in a fallen world, and they are necessary part of it, necessary to our testing and to our growth. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The triune God exercises total government over all things, and He requires us as His image-bearers to exercise government in Christ in our own spheres in terms of His law. — Rousas John Rushdoony

The urge to dominion is God-given and is basic to the nature of man. An aspect of this dominion is property. — Rousas John Rushdoony

[T]he more man accepts his limitations, the better is he enabled to know things truly. — Rousas John Rushdoony

But, while a man can be restrained by strict law and order, he cannot be changed by law; he cannot be saved by law. Man can only be saved by the grace of God through Jesus Christ. — Rousas John Rushdoony