J. Budziszewski Quotes

There are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve.

Your worldview has to have the same shape that reality does.

To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.

Depraved conscience turns out to be as different from genuine ignorance as it is from honest recognition.

When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.

Jesus, I am sorry.

Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.

Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.

The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.

The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.

Or perhaps the syndrome we are witnessing is preemptive capitulation: If we reduce our conscience to rubble before the bad men get here, they will have nothing to destroy.

If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against God's inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused.