Religion mustn't interfere with the state - so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.

What is so funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. Laughter is the same and healthy response to the innocent foibles of men; and even to some which are not innocent.

Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.

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.

Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.

Ultimately freedom is necessary for a society, because every despotic society - for instance, the Russian society - lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma - the Marxist dogma of world redemption through Communism.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.