Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.
History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far-seeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit; and is involved in both freedom and necessity.
Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.
The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man’s interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.
The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.