Michael Novak > Quotes

“During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,” they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants.”
― Michael Novak

“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. ”
― Michael Novak

“A man is too insignificant to be preoccupied with his failures. All of the energy he has is required for attending to the loneliness, the pain, the needs of others.”
― Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness

“The choice to remain faithful to the drive to question (the fertile source of the experience of nothingness) brings with it an obscure joy. For to be faithful to that drive...is to be constantly expanding one's horizon, constantly losing one's life, and constantly regaining it. It is to be as alert to other persons, to situations, and to events as one can: to their fragility and terror, as well as to their obscure coherence and often veiled beauty. To be faithful to the drive to question is to accept despair as one's due, to accept risk as one's condition, and to accept the crumbs of discovery as joy. [...] The darkness is habitable...Those who accept the darkness as their lot are instantly secure, not through some newfound solidity but through the perception that insecurity is man's natural state, a truthful state, a healthy state.”
― Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness

“Love is a willingness to sacrifice.”
― Michael Novak

“Intercourse is the organic expression of two psyches, not a mechanical plugging in.”
― Michael Novak

“We can talk about human dignity, but where is it?”
― Michael Novak, Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative

“Capitalism is ... a social order favorable to alertness, inventiveness, discovery, and creativity. This means a social order based upon education, research, the freedom to create, and the right to enjoy the fruit's of one's own creativity.”
― Michael Novak

“Communist atheism denies any transcendent dimension to being, any call to which humans must freely respond, any standard of truth, evidence, moral integrity, and goodness by which humans are every
moment being judged. For the Communist, all is nothingness except the Dialectic of History, before which and in whose name he prostrates himself. The Communist borrows from Christianity and Judaism a
comfort, viz. that his prostration places him on the side of justice and compassion. Yet his comfort is unwarranted because it rests on ideas in which his premises forbid him to believe. For the Communist
has only one moral principle: the Collective Will of the Party. All else can be done in that name: murder, torture, imprison, exterminate, assassinate. No other moral question can be scientifically raised. There is in man no internal source of dignity. Personal liberty and
personal responsibility cannot be honored in theory, although of course they continued to live on among individuals. In theory, these realities are dismissed as bourgeois affectations. The Communist's moral comforts are stolen from elsewhere.”
― Michael Novak

“Not all of those who cry "The poor, the poor!" will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
― Michael Novak

“Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice.”
― Michael Novak

“Liberty is the object of the Republic. Liberty needs virtue. Virtue among the people is impossible without religion.”
― Michael Novak

“Our moral and cultural traditions have not kept pace with our economic possibilities. We try to match new demands with a spiritual life not designed for them.”
― Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

“Winning is the only thing' does not mean 'win at all costs, by any means, fair or foul.' Nor does it mean that losing is without dignity. Every team, even the Green Bay Packers at their best, loses sometimes. It means that losing is, in the end, one's own responsibility. One's own fault. It means there are no excuses. 'Winning is the only thing' is capable of sinister interpretations. But it is also capable of expressing the highest human cravings for perfection. Winning does not simply mean crushing one's foes but being the best one can possibly be--and conquering the fates and adversities that are stronger forces even than opposing teams. Winning is both excellence and vindication in the face of the gods. It is a form of thumbing one's nose, for a moment, at the cancers and diseases that, in the end, strike us all down, every one of us, even spirits as alive as Vince Lombardi's.”
― Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports, Revised: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls & the Consecration of the American Spirit

“The aftertaste of affluence is boredom.”
― Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life

“Of course. A new consciousness - I that that is the word,' said the old man after he had thought a moment. 'That is what I hope it is. You and your African and Colombian, you are speaking the same language now, you know the same ideas. You are conscious that life on earth is flux. Men are better educated. They are more disciplined than in the past - their schedules are harder, their lives move faster, efficiency digs into them. Men are more sophisticated -every day they have more alternatives to choose among than they can possibly exhaust. Through psychiatry they know their strengths and weaknesses. They know the risks of every choice. This is what I mean by consciousness. Men know so much about everything they do. It was much simpler when they didn't know, when they simply acted out of instinct, believed from instinct, loved from instinct, brought up children by their instincts. Perhaps people were even happier. But now we are more conscious. We have got to live with our greater knowledge. We have got to live with our greater freedom.”
― Michael Novak, The Tiber was Silver

“... capitalism better helps the poor to escape from poverty than any other system, especially better than socialism. ... Capitalism rewards effort, talent, inventiveness, and luck [but not] equal outcomes, because ... equality can be achieved only by abandoning liberty for tyranny.”
― Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism