That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

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.

The fanatic is dangerous.

There was a time when I had all the answers. My real growth began when I discovered that the questions to which I had the answers were not the important questions.