Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.

I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.

Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

I might say that the debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me, because the Christians say, "You must be a Christian, or you must be a religious man, in order to be good," and the atheists will say, "It's beneath the dignity of a free man to bow his knee to a god, as if he were a sinner," or something like that.

Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.