Francis Schaeffer Quotes

If any imagine from the literary tone of the preceding remarks that we are indifferent to the radical movement for the benefit of the masses which is the crowning glory of the nineteenth century, they will soon discover their egregious mistake.

Progressive politics is not something to be bolted on to another cause.

You have to believe that it's through politics that societies can lead social and economic and political change.

To that movement, consecrated by religious principle, sustained by an awful sense of justice, and cheered by the brightest hopes of future good, all our powers, talents, and attainments are devoted.

The progress of society depends on nothing more than the exposure of time-honored abuses.

Prohibition is the greatest effort for human advancement and betterment ever attempted in history

An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just.

Abolition didn't just happen - people made it happen. Women's suffrage didn't just happen - people made it happen. Civil Rights legislation didn't just happen - people made it happen. And marriage equality didn't just happen, either - people made it happen.

I came up in a time where the assumption was, in the '60s and '70s, where the federal government was a great agent of progressive social change, it was the intervener in the best sense, and it would come and address injustice forthrightly.

I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.

Conservatism defends those coercive arrangements which a still-lingering savageness makes requisite. Radicalism endeavours to realize a state more in harmony with the character of the ideal man.

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.

America has to make America become a better place for all Americans, and that's all of us participating.

I'm a man that has a vision as to how this world can be, and I've gathered myself through all the ordeals that I had to make me a well-rounded person and still fight for justice.

I believe there are huge numbers of people in this country who would be willing to have radical changes in our economic and social system in order to make it a more egalitarian society and do away with homelessness and hunger and clean up the environment. But these people have no voice. They have no way of expressing themselves. Elections give them no way of expressing themselves.

To see an African-American elected president means that this country is really finally coming full circle from the birth defect of slavery.

To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty--to the poor and humble.

It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

An authentic faith always implies a deep desire to change the world.

If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress.