Dwight Longenecker Quotes

Like Achilles, the hero who forgot his heel, or like Icarus who, flying close to the sun, forgot that his wings were made of wax, we should be wary when triumphant ideas seem unassailable, for then there is all the more reason to predict their downfall.

Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity

If we are not careful, this false culture can dull our senses and lull us into a kind of trance, and we begin to exist in a nether world of attractive lies and half-truths.

First we overlook evil. Then we permit evil. Then we legalize evil. Then we promote evil. Then we celebrate evil. Then we persecute those who still call it evil.

These deceptions are the foundation of the modern world. Living in the high-tech twenty-first century is like dancing on quicksand. Nothing seems certain. Everything shifts. The center cannot hold.

Maybe dealing rationally with the physical world is the more primitive part of us, while the capacity to interact abstractly with an unseen realm is the highest point of our human development.

the desire to sacrifice oneself for love is so otherworldly that it must have come from another world. It is so alien to the tooth and claw of natural selection that it must be the result of a supernatural selection.

The ideology of our own society is the most boorish and vulgar of all—we wish to enjoy total individual sexual freedom, so those who impede that (the unborn) are eliminated. Thus it is that every human ideology that strives sincerely for a better life ends up destroying life. Those ideologues who dream of a better humanity inevitably end up killing humans.

Just as certainly as the false gods of paganism demanded the bloody sacrifice of children, so the idolatrous ideologies demand blood. Push any ideology far enough and you will find violence, murder, mayhem, and genocide. This is because idealogues live for an idea—they do not live for life—and any ideology that does not put life first will invariably put it last.

In a world where truth is “what works for you,” the fool who proposes that truth is objective will seem as laughable as Cyrano with his rubber nose. In an age where beauty is a skeletal slattern, a pornographic picture, or a butch biker with tattoos, the one who believes in the frail beauty of Belle or Beatrice or the Blessed Virgin is an amusing and archaic knight. In a world where the bottom line is the profit margin, one who seeks the top line of honesty and honor will seem like a ridiculous Don Quixote.

Asking for physical proof for God’s existence is like asking for proof of the existence of energy. Energy is everywhere. We assume its existence because we see its effects. We can understand the sources of energy and the forms it takes. We can devise theories about how energy changes and how energy behaves, but if I wanted to obstinately doubt the existence of energy how could anyone prove its existence?