A friend asks if I know the difference between a saint and a martyr: A saint is someone who radiates goodness and bears no faults. A martyr is someone who lives with a saint.
Our Founders always wondered about how long it would last. The price of liberty is everlasting vigilance. You’ve got to be on your guard every minute or you will lose it.
Sports is, somehow, a religion.
Individual freedom is a Jewish idea, but it’s one of the functions of Christianity to make this idea universal.
Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.
You’re a sovereign as a citizen. If you’re not involved in your government, you’re not doing your job. In the long run that’s very bad for the Republic.
I need not to be afraid of the void. The void is part of my person. I need to enter consciously into it. To try to escape from it is to try to live a lie. It is also to cease to be. My acceptance of despair and emptiness constitutes my being; to have the courage to accept despair is to be.
The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question.
Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.
In most of history, societies have not been free. It’s a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.
What is the most effective, practical way of raising the wealth of nations? What causes wealth? I have come to think that the dream of democratic socialism is inferior to the dream of democratic capitalism, and that the latter’s superiority in actual practice is undeniable.
The most critical threat to our freedom is a failure to appreciate the power of truth.
Unity in diversity is the highest possible attainment of a civilization, a testimony to the most noble possibilities of the human race. This attainment is made possible through passionate concern for choice, in an atmosphere of social trust.
Sports events do not really exist at all unless there is a certain order and fairness – justice in each event.
Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.
Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.
It is almost inconceivable that citizens of that time were willing to support so bloody a war, by putting so high a price upon Union and Liberty.
To go into a competition and not strive to win is to be a dishonest competitor.
There is a bigotry rampant in America, against evangelicals. It is the last respectable bigotry.
Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one’s breath away.
Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.