Pope Francis Quotes

I believe in the old warrior's credo that "to the victor go the spoils."

Imagine, to become a priest there are eight years of study and preparation, and then if after a while you can't do it, you can ask for a dispensation, you leave, and everything is OK.

The Pope is a man. The Pope needs the input of women, too. And the Pope, too, has a heart that can have a healthy, holy friendship with a woman.

I love it when people can actually engage with the materials of the sacrament in advance.

The two key words for the European Union are creativity and fruitfulness. That's the challenge.

I allow myself to honor the man who fought in moments when he had no strength to impose himself, until he managed to impose himself. [Joseph] Ratzinger. Cardinal Ratzinger deserves applause.

10 days before the death of St. John Paul II, in that Via Crucis of Holy Friday, Joseph Ratzinger said to the whole Church that it needed to clean up the dirt of the Church.

The economic part is the one that came out first because there were some problems about which the press spoke a lot.

I had an experience of knowing the Polish people when I was a child, and where my father worked many Poles came to work after the war. They were good people, and this has stayed in my heart.

I don't like it when I hear it said: 'but these youth say stupid things!'

I believe that in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists.

The victims of problems of the family are the children. The children. Even of problems that neither husband nor wife have a say in.

The youth say stupid things and they say good things, as we do, as everyone does. But hear them, speak with them, because we must learn from them and they must learn from me, from us.

It's true, harm to Catholics must always be avoided, and all of us do this...but not at the price of the truth!

I had a long conversation with the imam, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar University, and I know how they think... They seek peace, encounter.

If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.

Not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there's everything. There are violent persons of this religion.

I do not believe it is right to identify Islam with violence. This is not right or true.

The people of America, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners.

The charismatics confused the holy liturgy with a school of samba, but than I was converted when I got to know them better and saw the good they do.

We can coexist well [with Muslims]. But there are fundamentalist groups.

All of us benefit from remembering our past. A people which remembers does not repeat past errors; instead, it looks with confidence to the challenges of the present and the future.

The world is polarized. The middle class becomes smaller. The polarization makes the difference between rich and the poor big. This is true.

Poverty is part of the natural condition and that is bad enough. But my task is to prevent the aggravation of this condition.

God chooses the Pope and God also made men and women different.

There is nothing the Church can do except try to educate people to become good consumers.

I'm the type of human who is interested most in the truth. God gave me a healthy love for the truth.

Happiness means knowing how to limit some needs which only diminish us, and being open to the many different possibilities which life can offer.

We need to remember and remind ourselves where we come from, what we are, our nothingness.

What need does the earth have of us?

...only the exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman has a plenary role to play in society as a stable commitment that bears fruit in new life.

Narcissism makes people incapable of looking beyond themselves, beyond their own desires and needs.

Instead of imposing new obligations, (Christians) should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet.

God forgives not with a decree but with a caress. Jesus too goes beyond the law and forgives by caressing the wounds of our sins.

The problem is not in being sinners, the problem is when we don't let ourselves be transformed in love by the encounter with Christ.

Truth is a relationship. As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one's own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.

We can get angry: it's even healthy to get angry from time to time.

We need to let ourselves be evangelized by the poor. They have much to teach us.

This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation.

When I was a seminarian, I was dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle's wedding. I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance... and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while.

Money has to serve, not to rule.

Abortion isn't a lesser evil, it's a crime. Taking one life to save another, that's what the Mafia does. It's a crime. It's an absolute evil.