All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.

All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each mans interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.

The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.

Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarrassing family, friends, and even strangers.

All that a good government aims at... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.

We have made mistakes. In our haste to do all things for all people, we did not foresee the full consequences of our actions. And when the people raised their voices, we didn't hear. But our deafness was only a temporary condition, and not an irreversible condition.

It would be immoral to walk away from the consequences of our actions, leaving behind anarchy and civil war in Iraq.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

I just love having a buzz all the time, regardless of the consequences.

Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

In arriving at a decision in a question of doubt, the apostles in the Acts were guided solely by their sense of the Spirit behind the action, not by any speculations as to consequences which might ensue. And so they found the truth.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

I used to be a good party boy. I'm old. I'm an old man. You pay the consequences. I'm just fine with a couple of drinks, no more than that.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

I mean that the function of the police is to solve problems that have law-enforcement consequences in a way that is based on a genuine partnership with the neighborhood in both the venting of the problem and the discussion of the solution.

Every person has free choice. Free to obey or disobey the Natural Laws. Your choice determines the consequences. Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.

I am not a politician... I only suffer the consequences.

What we can do is to explain as clearly as possible what the benefits would be of him going down one path, and what the potential consequences would be if he chooses another path.

The tragedy of September 11th was so sudden, so enormous, and so horrendous, both in terms of lives lost and global consequences, that this country and the world went into immediate and prolonged shock.

But men never violate the laws of God without suffering the consequences, sooner or later.

Sometime they don't let you know that they know that they don't know everything, but the core of the medical approach is that you try to identify pathologies, which are subsystems within the human body or the larger system that are having undesirable consequences.