R.J. Rushdoony Quotes

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.

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.

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.

We cannot use our thoughts and feelings as a standard: only God’s Word is the test.

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

The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt 'humanistic' system is a God-centered government.

There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance... Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide

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.

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.

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.

It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society

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

All men are NOT created equal before God; the facts of heaven and hell, election and reprobation make clear that they are not equal. Moreover, an employer has aproperty rights to prefer whom he will in terms of "color" creed, race or national origin.

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.

The Bible identifies 15 crimes against the family worthy of the death penalty. Abortion is treason against the family and deserves the death penalty. Adultery is treason to the family; adulterers should be put to death. Homosexuality is treason to the family, and it too, is worthy of death.

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

Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.

Only a law-order which holds to the primacy of God's law can bring forth true freedom, freedom for justice, truth, and godly life. Freedom as an absolute is simply an assertion of man's "right" to be his own god; this means a radical denial of God's law-order. "Freedom" thus is another name for the claim by man to divinity and autonomy. It means that man becomes his own absolute.

Whenever freedom is made into the absolute, the result is not freedom but anarchism. Freedom must be under law, or it is not freedom.

Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.

Biblical law permits voluntary slavery because it recognizes that some people are not able to maintain a position of independence . . . The law is humane and also unsentimental. It recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

The 'civil rights' revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power. . . Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive.

The Lord supplies our needs, but not our selfishness

A man's faith governs the totality of his life, or else his professed faith is not his real faith.

Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life.

The matriarchal society is thus the decadent and broken. The strongly matriarchal character of Negro life is due to the moral failure of Negro men, their failure to be responsible, to support the family, or to provide authority. The same is true of American Indian tribes which are also matriarchal today.

Few things are more commonly misunderstood than the nature and meaning of theocracy. It is commonly assumed to be a dictatorial rule by self-appointed men who claim to rule for God. In reality, theocracy in Biblical law is the closest thing to a radical libertarianism that can be had.

But integration and equality are myths; they disguise a new segregation and a new equality...Every social order institutes its own program of separation or segregation. A particular faith and morality is given privileged status and all else is separated for progressive elimination.

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.

God in His law requires the death penalty for homosexuals.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

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

Do we need more laws? God forbid! We need more righteousness, more freedom, and more godly men -- and fewer laws.

Life is rarely easy, but, with Christ our King, it is always good.

The only true order is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion.

In the name of equal rights, women are being stripped of the protections of the family and given no place except the perverse competition of a sexual market in which increasingly shock, deviation, and aggressiveness command a premium . . .

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.

The background of the Negro culture is voodoo and magic; and the purposes the magic are control and power over God, man, nature and society. Voodoo and magic was the religion and life of America's Negro.

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.

One faith, one law and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state . . . Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.

The goal is the developed Kingdom of god, the New Jerusalem, a world order under god's law.

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.

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

Humanistic law aims at saving man and remaking society. For Humanism, salvation is an act of the state.

Man lives in time but his life transcends time.

Segregation or separation is thus a basic principle of Biblical Law with respect to religion and morality. Every attempt to destroy this principle is an effort to reduce society to its lowest common denominator.

All religions segregate also...every religion asserts an order of truth and every other order is regarded as a lie.

Concerning the press and politicians, the hatred for all such evangelical groups is not because of their real or fancied blunders but because they have reintroduced biblical morality into politics.

[A] society which makes freedom its primary goal will lose it, because it has made, not responsibility, but freedom from responsibility, its purpose. When freedom is the basic emphasis, it is not responsible speech which is fostered but irresponsible speech.