We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.

The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap... When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited, but was defined before it existed.