Quotes by J. Budziszewski

“The unitive capacities of the spouses don't exist for nothing; they exist for motherhood and fatherhood. That is the matrix in which they develop, for children change us in a way we desperately nee...”

“Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own, through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God--through certainty that only God can set...”

“Of course there is such a thing as too much doubt, for we ought to accept what is true. But there is also such a thing as proper doubt, for we ought not accept what is false. The possibility of dou...”

“Why not say that the meaning and purpose of the sexual powers is pleasure? Certainly sex is pleasurable, but there is nothing distinctive about that. In various ways and degrees, the exercise of ev...”

“The first objection is that it is rubbish to talk about natural meanings and purposes, because we merely imagine such things. According to the objector's way of thinking, meanings and purposes aren...”

“What your body does is unrelated to your heart. Don't believe it. The same survey reports that hooking up commonly takes place when both participants are drinking or drunk, and it's not hard to gue...”

“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.”

“There is even a certain tendency to punish those who do try to see. A case in point: At the dawn of the sexual revolution, social scientists produced statistical studies purporting to show that chi...”

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

“Are we really moral monkeys? I don't think so. We only strike the nihilist pose selectively, to put to shame rules we no longer try to keep. When it suits us, we can be quite Puritanical: Right and...”

“Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by si...”

“Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of "playing fair." "Does he? Try making up your own idea of what's fair--say, "giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers"--and see how ...”

“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.”

“If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition "All meaning is relative" would be relative. Therefore the proposition "All meaning is relative" destroys itself. It ...”

“Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger o...”

“in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason can...”

“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.”