Top 80 Rod Dreher Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In a time when people have forgotten how to be neighbors, simply sharing a meal or a movie together is a political act.”

— Rod Dreher

52. “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

53. “People long for God, and more of them than we might think are willing to accept the idea that getting close to him might be painful. The church needs to worry less about coddling our superficial tastes and impulses and more about giving us the whole truth.”

— Rod Dreher

54. “In the Commedia, recall, sin consists not only in loving and desiring bad things but also in loving and desiring good things in the wrong way.”

— Rod Dreher

55. “This was a revolution even more radical than the 1917 Bolshevik event, said Rieff. For the first time, humankind was seeking to create a civilization based on the negation of any binding transcendent order.”

— Rod Dreher

56. “If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of “stability” – meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.”

— Rod Dreher

57. “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

58. “Bibliotherapy” – using books to treat psychological disorders – may be a new trend, but for me, it came naturally.”

— Rod Dreher

59. “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

60. “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

61. “We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.”

— Rod Dreher

62. “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

63. “What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.”

— Rod Dreher

64. “I’m not denying that what you’re going through is real. What I’m saying is that you need to decide what you believe about memories. They aren’t who you are. They aren’t who you have to be. Even if things like this keep happening, and they likely will, you have to decide how much you will internalize them.”

— Rod Dreher

65. “One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases – the personal is political – captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.”

— Rod Dreher

66. “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

67. “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero.”

— Rod Dreher

68. “Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” in order to bring about “social justice.”

— Rod Dreher

69. “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

70. “We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.26.”

— Rod Dreher

71. “Patrik says the key is to expose children to stories that help them know the difference between truth and falsehood, and teach them how to discern this in real life.”

— Rod Dreher

72. “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

73. “In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it,” says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. “All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn’t agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.”

— Rod Dreher

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture’s memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story – a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.”

— Rod Dreher

78. “In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

— Rod Dreher

79. “It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”

— Rod Dreher

80. “But truth cannot be separated from tears. To live in truth requires accepting suffering.”

— Rod Dreher

81. “The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct. To be modern is to be free to choose. What is chosen does not matter; the meaning is in the choice itself. There is no sacred order, no other world, no fixed virtues and permanent truths. There is only here and now and the eternal flame of human desire. Volo ergo sum – I want, therefore I am.”

— Rod Dreher

82. “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

83. “If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly.”

— Rod Dreher

84. “To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes.”

— Rod Dreher