(167 quotes)
Silence used to be seen as golden. Today it’s usually referred to as awkward.
It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It’s the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.
Peter Kreeft
When I was young I had something other than Facebook: A real life.
Chris Stefanick
An imbecile habit has risen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma was credible in the 12th century, but is not credible in the 20th. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.
G.K. Chesterton
If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.
Saint Augustine
If you only follow the teachings of the Church that you like and reject what you don’t like, then it is not Christ and the Catholic faith that you claim to believe in, but yourself. The creed that we profess does not begin by saying, “I believe in me…”
Among the very rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must also be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton
Money can buy everything money can buy, which is just a lot of stuff.
Peter Kreeft
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
G.K. Chesterton
The first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning could be a clue to what you worship.
He who does not believe in God will believe in anything.
Emile Cammaerts
Because Americans cram so much into their lives, we tend to schedule our headaches.
The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.
H.L. Mencken
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
G.K. Chesterton
We are all “conservatives” in some sense, because we want to “conserve” some things while changing others. We are all “liberals” because we all want to be “free” in some respects. We are all “progressives” because we want to progress towards something: the question is, towards what? So instead of asking someone, are you conservative or liberal, right-wing or left-wing, why don’t I ask what you want to conserve, and what to change, and why? Then we might finally have an intelligent debate about politics.
Stratford Caldecott
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive.
C.S. Lewis
Today we would do well by quieting down and actually thinking about and discussing important, complex issues in our society. Instead, we have the exact opposite: a lot of people thinking less and shouting more.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries simply because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
We need to have the mind of a conservative and the heart of a liberal.
Peter Kreeft
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
G.K. Chesterton
These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
G.K. Chesterton
There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.
G.K. Chesterton
The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.
Father Thomas Berry
The zeal of atheists is the most admirable thing about them.
Dale Ahlquist
The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness.
Pope Benedict XVI
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, which determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
T.S. Eliot
We have sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell
If we don’t educate our children someone else will.
Father Ronald Knox
Whoever marries the spirit of the times must soon become a widower.
Peter Kreeft
Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.
Peter Kreeft
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance – it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not so nearly overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
It is better to be a child of God than king of the whole world.
Saint Aloysius Gonzaga
Sometimes we are looked upon as people who speak only of prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Pope Benedict XVI
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
G.K. Chesterton
Possessions possess.
There are also two Christianities in the world today. There is (1) the Christianity of the New Testament, and there is (2) the Christianity of accommodation to modernism, egalitarianism, niceness, naturalism, pop psychology, secular humanism, relativism, subjectivism, individualism, “Enlightenment” rationalism or postmodern irrationalism. New converts to the first Christianity are constantly amazed and scandalized by finding many of their clergy to be in love with the second and in fear of the first.
Peter Kreeft
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Maggie Thatcher
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Coach John Wooden
There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
G.K. Chesterton
The Sabbath is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2172
Diversion and indifference are the two widest roads to Hell in today’s world.
Peter Kreeft
The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Modern Americans make the same mistake but judge neither.
Peter Kreeft
It’s a big error to dream of a society where nobody needs to be good.
Mahatma Ghandi
Instead of loving the Trinity of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), we tend to love a different trinity: Me, myself, and I.
Mark Hart
We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press… It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.
G.K. Chesterton
As the Pope has pointed out, the language of “human rights” has now been downgraded in public discourse to the special pleading of every interest group.
N.T. Wright
Justice never means “treating everybody the same way”, but “treating people appropriately”.
N.T. Wright
What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don’t need.
From the movie Fight Club
There is no conflict between religion and science.
Father Georges Lemaître (father of the Big Bang theory)
There is no conflict between science and theology, except where there is bad science or bad theology.
Father Theodore Hesburgh
Katy Perry’s attitude reminds me of what Americans believe about Hell. Most of them believe there is one and when asked who will go there the answer is, “Everyone who is a little worse than I am”.
Jon Forrest
A lot of pop culture is like junk food. It tastes great, but you can’t live off it.
The great tragedy of atheists is that they walk through this world and have no one to thank.
Leo Tolstoy
Americans are scared to death of death.
The East possesses a distorted faith without reason; the West a distorted reason without faith.
A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.
G.K. Chesterton
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
Werner Heisenberg (awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics)
You can tell how healthy a society is by how it treats its weakest members.
Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.
Peter Kreeft
Ideas either govern the world or throw it into chaos.
Auguste Comte
We want religion to be a matter of discussion. Jesus wants it to be a matter of decision.
Father Mike Schmitz
Nine out of ten things which we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.
People say you are what you eat, but more accurately you are what you consume, especially when it comes to media (music, movies, TV shows, etc.).
Greg Iwinski
Most of what we see on TV teaches us that buying a lot of products makes us happy; that young is good and old is bad; that we should eat whatever we want but that we also need to be thin; that suffering doesn’t have any meaning; that relationships never last; that most families are dysfunctional; that authority is dangerous; and that religious people are hypocritical.
Archbishop Charles Chaput
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
G.K. Chesterton
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
Saint John Paul the Great
Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.
G.K. Chesterton
I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.
G.K. Chesterton
For the most part we’re too busy doing just about everything that means just about nothing to just about nobody just about anywhere and will mean even less to anyone 100 years from now.
Matthew Kelly
We are no longer able to hear God. There are too many frequencies filling our ears.
Pope Benedict VXI
Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
Saint John Paul the Great
To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.
A.W. Tozer
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
G.K. Chesterton
If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.
Question asked to Archbishop Harry Flynn: What do you consider to be the biggest concern for American Catholics today.
Archbishop Flynn’s response: Christians who do not want to go deeper with Christ.
The reason we’re bored is because we don’t love anything.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
The things you own end up owning you.
From the movie Fight Club
We always need to be more Catholic than we are Republican or Democrat.
Joan Rosenhauer
One of the problems with evangelicalism is that it has allowed itself to be married to the Republican party… Jesus is not a Republican. Nor is he a Democrat.
Tony Campolo
You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by the society – completely forgotten, completely left alone. That is the greatest poverty of the rich countries.
Blessed Mother Teresa
Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton
Modern minds no longer object to the Church because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They no longer have difficulties with the Creed, but with her Commandments. The heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought, but of action.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
We have laws against polluting our rivers but not against polluting our minds.
Father Robert Barron
If you believe Sesame Street taught your four-year-old something, then you better believe MTV is teaching your 14-year-old something
Dr. Jane Brown
The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.
Brooks, from the movie The Shawshank Redemption
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
G.K. Chesterton
The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of an unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a print shop.
Edwin Conklin (biologist, zoologist, and science professor at Princeton University)
America is mission territory – whether we recognize it yet or not.
Archbishop Charles Chaput
The problem of our age is not one of broken hearts, but hardened hearts.
Father Ronald Knox
If you aren’t shaping the world, it’s shaping you.
Today we have separated the big questions from the little questions and neither is getting answered very well.
Dale Ahlquist
Jesus embraces every person, but not every idea.
I’ve won every debate I’ve had with an atheist, and never converted even a single one.
Frank Sheed
I expect to die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.
Cardinal Francis George
We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty – these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it’s never an end itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil.
Archbishop Charles Chaput
We are given to the cult of personality; when things go badly we look to some messiah to save us. If by chance we think we have found one, it will not be long before we destroy him.
Constantine Karamanlis
By far the most dangerous people in the world are optimists (those who believe that all can be made well here below). If you think all can be made well in this world, then you will go to any extreme to make it happen. There is the story of the 20th century. As Lenin said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”.
Father Robert Barron
The Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! “Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more!”
Dr. Seuss, from How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
The world is currently in the habit of using philosophy to justify pre-existing ideas, rather than letting philosophy kick their butts and force them to change.
Marc Barnes
Beware of antics with semantics.
No age has been more prone to confuse the sin with the sinner, not by hating the sinner along with the sin but by loving the sin along with the sinner. We often use “compassion” as an equivalent for moral relativism.
Peter Kreeft
We’re so busy today that we don’t have time to waste time anymore.
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Saint John Paul the Great
Ever seen a U-Haul behind a hearse?
Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.
Saint John Paul the Great
There is no subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance. Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles, but never to persons.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
We live in a culture in which condoms can be handed out in schools and Bibles can’t. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about our society.
Janet Smith
The idea of a judgment of history is secularism’s vain, meaningless, hopeless, pathetic attempt to devise a substitute for what the great Abrahamic traditions of faith know is the final judgment of almighty God, who is not an impersonal force. History is not God. God is God. History is not our judge. God is our Judge.
Robert P. George
I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture.
Pope Francis
When there is an apparent conflict between science and religion it is either because of bad science or bad religion, or both.
Father Robert Barron
Higher education is being enslaved to the idea that every student is just there to become a professional. That is not education, that is training. And that is fundamentally different from the Catholic understanding of the human person.
Massimo Faggioli
I’m not on Team Edward or Team Jacob, I’m on Team Jesus.
Samantha Letscher
Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Ever since discernment became popular no one has made a decision since.
Matt Fradd
While the world changes, the cross stands firm.
Saint Bruno
The only thing particularly new about the “new atheism” is its nastiness.
Father Robert Barron
We do religion like we do Facebook. Every interaction is under our control.
Chris Stefanick
We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.
Pope Francis
The world suffers nothing from Christians but hates them because they reject its pleasures.
Saint Justin Martyr
The cross is steady while the world is turning.
Saint Bruno
Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.
N.T. Wright
The liberal/conservative thing, I think, is destructive of the Church’s mission and her life. I’ve said that publicly a lot at times. You’re taking a definition that comes out of nowhere, as far as we’re concerned, it’s a modern distinction, and making it the judgment of the Church’s life. It’s because we’re lazy. You put a label on people, you put a label on something, and it saves you the trouble of thinking.
Cardinal Francis George
For us, the category that matters is true/false. I reject the whole liberal/conservative deformation of the character of our lives.
Cardinal Francis George
People with a lot of theological study and no prayer life are dangerous… and not in a good way.
Mark Hart
Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness.
Father Robert Barron
The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation.
Taylor Swift
The most deadly poison of our times is indifference.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe
When a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile.
Peter Kreeft
Put the Protestant flint and the Catholic steel together, and you will kindle a fire that will burn all around the world.
Peter Kreeft
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
Man doesn’t matter if he’s nothing but matter.
Chris Stefanick
Our culture takes what is important and makes it trivial and takes what is trivial and makes it important.
There has certainly been a scandal caused by the hierarchy in recent years. But there should also be a scandal caused by the laity, who eat God to become like Him yet remain nothing like Him.
Faith does not contradict reason. Faith exceeds reason.
Mark Hart
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
The Ten Commandments are not just a list of rules, they are instructions for happiness.
From the book Theology of the Body for Teens: Middle School Edition
The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world.
A.W. Tozer
Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
It’s a dark culture that we live in. But you were called to glow in the dark.
Curtis Martin
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France
History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it oftentimes rhymes.
We can never get enough of the stuff we don’t really need.
Matthew Warner
Today, the only surviving sin is believing that sin exists at all.
Matt Archbold
Our busy, ultra-technological age has made us even sicker. Noise has become like a drug on which our contemporaries are dependent. With its festive appearance, noise is a whirlwind that avoids looking oneself in the face and confronting the interior emptiness.
Cardinal Robert Sarah
Don’t tell me that the rebels of the world are singers and pop stars! Such people, obsessed with wealth, pleasure, fame, and power, are absolutely mainstream, run of the mill, ordinary as dirt. If you want to see real rebels, take a good hard look at the saints.
Bishop Robert Barron
If the new crime be, to believe in God, let us all be criminals.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
We’re all taught from a young age to violate the very first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Bobby Angel
Faith is never less than reason. What’s less than reason is superstition or stupidity. Faith is a grasp of truth that goes beyond reason.
Bishop Robert Barron
We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
Karl Barth
The failure of secular education is that it is merely a jumble of incoherent facts, many of which are not even facts. Knowledge for its own sake is futile. It is like studying auto parts without even knowing what a car is for, or even that a car exists. You don’t really get anywhere.
Dale Ahlquist
Every era tries to create a new religion, something more befitting the age, but new religions are only suited to what is new. And what is new is soon old.
Dale Ahlquist
The Catholic Church does not change with people’s tastes. It is a religion that binds men to their morality even when they are not in the mood to be moral.
Dale Ahlquist
The only Marian doctrine no longer doubted is the Immaculate Conception, because nowadays everyone thinks we all have been immaculately conceived. Hardly anyone today admits they’ve sinned, only that they have made “mistakes”.
Karl Keating
Faculty lounge interpretations of the resurrection as a subjective event or mere symbol is exactly what the tyrants of the world want for that poses no real threat to them. But the real cross and the real resurrection is always a taunt to tyrants.
Bishop Robert Barron
While moderns tend to reduce everything to freedom, the Church reduces everything to love, by which I mean, it puts all things in relation to love.
Bishop Robert Barron
I attack ideas. I don’t attack people.
Antonin Scalia
TV is largely a sewer pipe.
Peter Kreeft
The modern world is unhappy because it does not touch eternity.
Peter Kreeft
Catholic Quotations 