Concerns about democracy’s future ar... - George Weigel - Quotes.Pub

Concerns about democracy’s future are better directed elsewhere, John Paul argues, for if “there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.

Witness to Hope Quotes

George Weigel Quotes

By the time the draft constitution for the expanded European Union was finished and ready to be submitted for ratification by the member states, "Europe" as a political entity resembled nothing so much as a teenager who had just gone through a tremendous physical growth spurt but without a parallel growth in intellectual and moral maturity: physically an adult but spiritually stuck in adolescence. . . . Connoisseurs of political texts will note that the European constitution approved in June 2004 contains some 70,000 words (almost ten times the length of the U.S. Constitution). Yet the one word that could not be fit into the constitution for the new Europe--"Christianity"--is the embodiment of a story that has arguably had more to do with "constituting" Europe than anything else. What is going on when this story can't be acknowledged? Is it a case, as suggested above, of an adolescent engaging in a typically adolescent rebellion against parents? Is that rebellion in service of a particular (and particularly adolescent) understanding of the freedom that Europe's new constitution is meant to celebrate and advance?

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe Quotes America Quotes and Politics Without God Quotes

a world where yesterday’s classmate and fellow altar server becomes tomorrow’s martyr to the firing squads.

Witness to Hope Quotes

the crisis of the modern world was first of all a crisis of ideas, a crisis in the very idea of the human person. History was driven by culture and the ideas that formed cultures. Ideas had consequences. And if the idea of the human person that dominated a culture was flawed, one of two things would happen. Either that culture would give birth to destructive aspirations, or it would be incapable of realizing its fondest hopes, even if it expressed them in the most nobly humanistic terms.

Witness to Hope Quotes

Poland was a reminder to the world that there is more to history and power than brute force; the human spirit can bend the course of history in nobler directions. Culture drives history, over the long haul.

City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II's Kraków Quotes

our lives are best understood, and our sorrows are best borne, when they are recognized as “playing” within a drama that God himself entered, in the person of his Son, so that the human drama might become, through the redemption, a divine comedy, not a cosmic tragedy or absurdity.

City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II's Kraków Quotes

European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences or European public life and European culture.

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe Quotes America Quotes and Politics Without God Quotes

He is an intellectual who is unbeholden to the shibboleths of the professoriat and who has a deep appreciation for untutored popular piety.

Witness to Hope Quotes

He is arguably the most well-informed man in the world, yet he rarely reads newspapers.

Witness to Hope Quotes

but he has never played the demagogue.

Witness to Hope Quotes

Karol Wojtyła, the disciple who was a product of the Church in the modern world, not of the Roman bureaucracy.

Witness to Hope Quotes

young—never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which you’re capable, with the help of God’s grace.

Witness to Hope Quotes

This life of ours . . . is a gift from God. It is not of our choosing. It comes to us by his choice. Since it is of his choosing, it is of his designing. We neither made ourselves nor can we manage ourselves as we like, nor manage the life that comes to us. For that reason we can take a most hopeful view of life. . . . [For] the thought that it is his gift and after his design gives us courage.

Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches Quotes

Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom. The life of Karol Wojtyła and his accomplishment as Pope John Paul II suggest a dramatic, alternative possibility: that a man who has been seized and transformed by the “more excellent way” can bend the curve of history so that freedom’s cause is advanced.

Witness to Hope Quotes

We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.

Witness to Hope Quotes

If moral relativism was legally absolutized in the name of tolerance, basic rights were also relativized and the door was open to totalitarianism.

Witness to Hope Quotes

American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important." -Robert Kagan

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe Quotes America Quotes and Politics Without God Quotes

Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.

Freedom Quotes

Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way.

Freedom Quotes

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".

Ideas are power Quotes

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.

Democracy Quotes

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