Christopher Dawson Quotes
As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.
The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.
Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.
The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.
The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.
It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.
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.
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 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.
If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.
American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.
Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one
Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in theorder of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.
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.
It is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life.
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
No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced
It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole
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.
Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.