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

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.

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.

The greater the tension, the greater is the potential.

If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.

I believe it's a good thing that people say, "Can we find a way to live together in peace?" And they did, for the most part.

I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Oh you only fight the fights you can win? You fight the fights that need fighting!

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.

My approach to gymnastics in Beijing was heavily based on the amount of difficulty I could do.

I haven't been part of the criminal world.

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.