23 Quotes by Francis A. Schaeffer

The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

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.

If we demand, in any of our relationships, either perfection or nothing. we will get the nothing. Only when we have learned this will we be Bible-believing Christians, and only then will we understand something of life. Only then can we be more understanding toward men and show real compassion. Consequently, I would repeat, if in any of our relationships of life we demand perfection or nothing, we will have nothing.

People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture -- in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the death of man in art and life.

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.

We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.

Today we have a weakness in our education process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation.

فكل من هؤلاء الفلاسفة يعبر عن الوجودية بصورة مختلفة لكنهم كلهم متفقون على إن الفكر المجرد يقود إلى شيء فظيع في مختلف المجالات. بما في ذلك مجال المعرفة. ففي رأي هؤلاء المفكرين أن المعرفة التي نصل إليها بفكرنا هي النظريات والقوانين الرياضية التي تجعل الإنسان مجرد اّلة. لكنهم يأملون أن يصلوا إلي نوع من الاختبار الصوفي العلوي الغامض الذي يختلف عن الفكر المجرد ويؤدي إلي الكليات.