Live Not by Lies Quotes

“And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those – even Christians – who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him. Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”9”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“In the coming soft totalitarianism, Christians will have to regard family life in a much more focused, serious way. The traditional Christian family is not merely a good idea—it is also a survival strategy for the faith in a time of persecution. Christians should stop taking family life for granted, instead approaching it in a more thoughtful, disciplined way. We cannot simply live as all other families live, except that we go to church on Sunday. Holding the correct theological beliefs and having the right intentions will not be enough. Christian parents must be intentionally countercultural in their approach to family dynamics. The days of living like everybody else and hoping our children turn out for the best are over.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment. For example, the Bendas didn’t opt out of popular culture but rather chose intelligently which parts of it they wanted their children to absorb. To visit the Benda family home is not to step into a Spartan barracks but rather into a place filled with books and art and life. The Benda family judged that they could be open to the good things in the world around them because of the disciplined moral, intellectual, and spiritual lives they lived within the family.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“It’s no accident that every dictatorship always tries to break down the family, because it’s in the family that you get the strength to be able to fight,”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the novel that previews what’s coming; it’s rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The contemporary social critic James Poulos calls this the “Pink Police State”: an informal arrangement in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in the context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions? How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“This is why Christians today must understand that, fundamentally, they aren’t resisting a different politics but rather what is effectively a rival religion.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The Baptists stood alone, but stand they did. If you have been discipled in a faith that takes seriously the Apostle Paul’s words that to suffer for Christ is gain and are prepared, as the Orthodox Kaleda family was, to live with reduced expectations of worldly success, it becomes easier to stand for the truth.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“No Christian has the power to avoid suffering entirely. It is the human condition. What we do control is how we act in the face of it. Will we run from it and betray our Lord? Or will we accept it as a severe mercy? The choices we will make when put to the ultimate test depend on the choices we make today, in a time of peace.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm—or at least not to oppose—to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will have to act openly to confront the lie directly. Other times you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Maybe they will just try to steer users into buying certain products and not others. But what happens when the products are politicians or ideologies? And how will people know when they are being manipulated?”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The kind of Christians we will be in the time of testing depends on the kind of Christians we are today.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a “Grand March” toward Progress: “The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The days to come are going to force American Christians to confront personal suffering for the faith in ways most never have done before (African American Christians are the obvious exception). Besides, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough: the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people’s love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“For us, the Soviet constitution had no meaning. Everybody knew these were just words that had no relation to real life. In this country, the Constitution is meaningful. We have an independent judiciary. We have to protect it. We don’t need to invent anything new—we just need to have the courage to protect what we have.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“God will eventually win, even though I may not see it in my life. So my suffering is not meaningless, because I am part of a greater battle that will be victorious in the end. That is what our father showed us by his life.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story”—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—“was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents