Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.

A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except the gratification of the ego; in politics it must end in anarchy. It is not possible for one man to be both Christian and Individualist.

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .

Why do we not exhaust the heritage of the ages, spiritual and material for our immediate pleasure, and let posterity go hang? So far as simple rationality is concerned, self-interest can advance no argument against the appetite of present possessors. Yet within some of us, a voice that is not the demand of self-interest or pure rationality says that we have no right to give ourselves enjoyment at the expense of our ancestors' memory and our descendants' prospects. We hold our present advantages only in trust.