George Weigel > Quotes

“Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.”
― George Weigel

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

“Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way.”
― George Weigel

“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.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“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.”
― George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

“We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“The crucial issue of the times, he suggested, was the human person: a unique being, who lived in a material world but had intense spiritual longings, a mystery to himself and to others, a creature whose dignity emerged from an interior life imprinted with the image and likeness of God. The world wanted to hear what the Church had to say about the human person and the human condition, particularly in light of other proposals—“scientific, positivist, dialectical”—that imagined themselves humanistic and presented themselves as roads to liberation. At the end of 2,000 years of Christian history, the world had a question to put to the Church: What was Christian humanism and how was it different from the sundry other humanisms on offer in late modernity? What was the Church’s answer to modernity’s widespread “despair [about] any and all human existence”?”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important." -Robert Kagan”
― George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

“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.”
― George Weigel, Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches

“Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done.”
― George Weigel

“If moral relativism was legally absolutized in the name of tolerance, basic rights were also relativized and the door was open to totalitarianism.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“The failure of Lateran V was the prelude to the Reformation, which shattered the unity of the Christian West and set in motion the dynamics that eventually led to the European wars of religion. Failures of reform carry a high cost.”
― George Weigel, The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform And The Future Of The Church

“As John Courtney Murray put it, the obligations of society and the state are “not coextensive with the wider and higher range of obligations that rest upon the human person (not to speak of the Christian)”. And thus “the morality proper to the life and action of society and the state is not univocally the morality of personal life, or even of familial life. . . The effort to bring the organized action of politics and the practical art of statecraft under the control of the Christian values that govern personal and familial life is inherently fallacious.”
― George Weigel, The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections On Turbulent Times

“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.”
― George Weigel, City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II's Kraków

“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.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“As John Courtney Murray put it, the obligations of society and the state are “not coextensive with the wider and higher range of obligations that rest upon the human person (not to speak of the Christian)”. And thus “the morality proper to the life and action of society and the state is not univocally the morality of personal life, or even of familial life. . . The effort to bring the organized action of politics and the practical art of statecraft under the control of the Christian values that govern personal and familial life is inherently fallacious. It makes wreckage not only of public policy but of morality itself.”
― George Weigel, The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections On Turbulent Times

“young—never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which you’re capable, with the help of God’s grace.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“The ability to love authentically, not great intellectual capacity, constitutes the deepest part of a personality. It is no accident that the greatest commandment is to love. Authentic love leads us outside ourselves to affirming others: devoting oneself to the cause of man, to people, and, above all, to God. Marriage makes sense…if it gives one the opportunity for such love, if it evokes the ability and necessity of such loving, if it draws one out of the shell of individualism (various kinds) and egocentrism. It is”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Love is not “fulfilling” oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“beings can only be free in the truth,”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“He is arguably the most well-informed man in the world, yet he rarely reads newspapers.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“2009 the International Society for Human Rights estimated”
― George Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic

“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.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“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?”
― George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

“Love, for Karol Wojtyła, was the truth at the very center of the human condition, and love always meant self-giving, not self-assertion.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“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.”
― George Weigel, City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II's Kraków

“Karol Wojtyła, the disciple who was a product of the Church in the modern world, not of the Roman bureaucracy.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“Cardinal Wojtyła and one of his auxiliary bishops, Juliusz Groblicki, clandestinely ordained priests for service in Czechoslovakia, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Holy See had forbidden underground bishops in that country to perform such ordinations. The clandestine ordinations in Kraków were always conducted with the explicit permission of the candidate’s superior—his bishop or, in the case of members of religious orders, his provincial. Security systems had to be devised. In the case of the Salesian Fathers, a torn-card system was used. The certificate authorizing the ordination was torn in half. The candidate, who had to be smuggled across the border, brought one half with him to Kraków, while the other half was sent by underground courier to the Salesian superior in Kraków. The two halves were then matched, and the ordination could proceed in the archbishop’s chapel at Franciszkańska, 3.

Cardinal Wojtyła did not inform the Holy See of these ordinations. He did not regard them as acts in defiance of Vatican policy, but as a duty to suffering fellow believers. And he presumably did not wish to raise an issue that could not be resolved without pain on all sides. He may also have believed that the Holy See and the Pope knew that such things were going on in Kraków, trusted his judgment and discretion, and may have welcomed a kind of safety valve in what was becoming an increasingly desperate situation.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“a world where yesterday’s classmate and fellow altar server becomes tomorrow’s martyr to the firing squads.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

“but he has never played the demagogue.”
― George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II