Top 70 Charles Colson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The true mark of a Christian leader is trying to build up other people. Raise up other leaders!”

— Charles Colson

2. “You are called not to be successful or to meet any of the other counterfeit standards of this world, but to be faithful and to be expended in the cause of serving the risen and returning Christ.”

— Charles Colson

3. “Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.”

— Charles Colson

4. “The Bible-banned, burned, beloved-is more widely read and more frequently attacked than any other book in history.”

— Charles Colson

5. “The church’s job is to equip the saints for works of service in the world.”

— Charles Colson

6. “The church is the only institution supernaturally endowed by God. It is the one institution of which Jesus promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

— Charles Colson

7. “The Bible’s historical accuracy is a reminder that while “the heavens declare the glory of God,” there’s also plenty of evidence among the rubble and ruins.”

— Charles Colson

8. “Remain at your post and do your duty – for the glory of God and His kingdom.”

— Charles Colson

9. “God doesn’t want our success; He wants us. He doesn’t demand our achievements; He demands our obedience.”

— Charles Colson

10. “Removing religious symbols from public places is not neutrality. On the contrary, it sends a highly negative message – that religion is something shameful, embarrassing, or at best strictly private.”

— Charles Colson

11. “Our society’s obsession with tolerance leads to intolerance. Simply being a Christian today is an offense to our culture.”

— Charles Colson

12. “We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.”

— Charles Colson

13. “What we do flows from who we are.”

— Charles Colson

14. “The Bible’s power rests upon the fact that it is the reliable, errorless, and infallible Word of God.”

— Charles Colson

15. “Redeeming culture is the never ending mission of the church.”

— Charles Colson

16. “If our culture is to be transformed, it will happen from the bottom up – from ordinary believers practicing apologetics over the backyard fence or around the barbecue grill.”

— Charles Colson

17. “A government cannot be truly just without affirming the intrinsic value of human life.”

— Charles Colson

18. “Frontline love. It is our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us.”

— Charles Colson

19. “We must be the same person in private and in public. Only the Christian worldview gives us the basis for this kind of integrity.”

— Charles Colson

20. “Knowing that we are fulfilling God’s purpose is the only thing that gives rest to the restless human heart.”

— Charles Colson

21. “Power is like saltwater; the more you drink, the thirstier you get.”

— Charles Colson

22. “Who speaks for God? He does quite nicely for Himself. Through His holy and infallible Word – and the quiet obedience of His servants.”

— Charles Colson

23. “God is truth and is to be worshiped, not because it’s convenient, makes us feel good, or is therapeutic.”

— Charles Colson

24. “Today’s marginalization of Christianity is a direct result of our failure to understand our faith as a total worldview.”

— Charles Colson

25. “Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.”

— Charles Colson

26. “True tolerance is not a total lack of judgment. It’s knowing what should be tolerated, and refusing to tolerate that which shouldn’t.”

— Charles Colson

27. “Few things are so deadly as a misguided sense of compassion.”

— Charles Colson

28. “Culture is religion incarnate.”

— Charles Colson

29. “I’d walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.”

— Charles Colson

30. “Tolerance once meant that we could use our reason to discern good and evil in open debate. Today tolerance has been used to call good evil and evil good.”

— Charles Colson

31. “Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.”

— Charles Colson

32. “One of the most wonderful things about being a Christian is that I don’t ever get up in the morning and wonder if what I do matters. I live every day to the fullest because I can live it through Christ and I know no matter what I do today, I’m going to do something to advance the Kingdom of God.”

— Charles Colson

33. “To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living.”

— Charles Colson

34. “Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.”

— Charles Colson

35. “Our culture has forgotten what the Founders knew: The American experiment is a moral, not just a political, exercise.”

— Charles Colson

36. “God uses prisons to train people for future roles of leadership or martyrdom.”

— Charles Colson

37. “When it comes to the culture, there’s no such thing as peaceful coexistence. If we’re not defending truth, fighting for Christian values in all of life, the truth will be sacrificed on the altar of mainstream secularism.”

— Charles Colson

38. “As agents of God’s common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew his creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty, and to heal and help those suffering from the results of the Fall.”

— Charles Colson

39. “When God wanted to defeat sin, His ultimate weapon was the sacrifice of His own Son. On Christmas Day two thousand years ago, the birth of a tiny baby in an obscure village in the Middle East was God’s supreme triumph of good over evil.”

— Charles Colson

40. “Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is.”

— Charles Colson

41. “Nearly every grave moral failure begins with a small sin.”

— Charles Colson

42. “Christians should never have a political party. It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology. Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believed in the revealing truth Scripture.”

— Charles Colson

43. “The problem is that relativism provides no sure foundation for a safe and orderly society.”

— Charles Colson

44. “If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society.”

— Charles Colson

45. “The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the bad news of the conviction of sin before it can be the Good News of redemption. The truth is revealed in God’s Holy Word; life can be lived only in absolute and disciplined submission to its authority.”

— Charles Colson

46. “Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing – since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.”

— Charles Colson

47. “I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.”

— Charles Colson

48. “Christians are called to redeem entire cultures, not just individuals.”

— Charles Colson

49. “Heroism is an extraordinary feat of the flesh; holiness is an ordinary act of the spirit. One may bring personal glory; the other always gives God glory.”

— Charles Colson

50. “Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problems.”

— Charles Colson