Rousas John Rushdoony Quotes

Sanctions are a very un-Christian weapon.

Sixty-nine percent think it's against God's will to clone human beings. Well, if it were against God's will, wouldn't he just kill all the cloners? Wouldn't he just stop it on his own?

...the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church ... a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

For me, as a Christian I will be uncomfortable because in all my teachings and all my learning, biblically, it's not right.

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

Today the logic goes something like this: 'Calling a ruler Son of God is out of style. No one really does that nowadays. We can support a president while also worshiping Jesus as the Son of God.' But how is this possible? For one says that we must love our enemies, and the other says we must kill them; one promotes the economics of competition, while the other admonishes the forgiveness of debts. To which do we pledge allegiance?

Most of the temptations that come to us to sell the soul come in connection with the getting of money.

Every good lawyer knows that if there is something in his client's cause that so personally offends you, morally, religiously, or if it so offends you that you think it would undermine your ability to do your duty as a lawyer, then you shouldn't take it on.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

Every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions.

It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

Maybe you shouldn't be working as a jailer in Guantánamo. Maybe that's why you feel spiritually unhealthy.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.

I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?

Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones. You just have to choose which wrong choices feels the least wrong.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.

That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

My personal opinion is that truth, like honesty and non-harmfulness, often are at odds with one another.