Christopher Dawson Quotes - Page 2

If man attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unexpected and unpleasant ways to take its revenge.

Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature.

Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language

Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum

Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms

Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in theorder of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.

Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.

Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one

The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.

Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act.