Top 60 Budziszewski Quotes
#1. Of course, for whatever is amiss in these pages (and there will be much), the blame is mine. But permit me to be grateful if anything in them is true.
J. Budziszewski
#3. Experience assists wisdom because the universe has been designed to make it so.
J. Budziszewski
#4. C. S. Lewis once wrote that man has two clues to the meaning of the universe. One is the knowledge of a law that he did not make but is obligated to keep; the other is the knowledge that he does not and cannot keep it.
J. Budziszewski
#5. Your worldview has to have the same shape that reality does.
J. Budziszewski
#6. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
J. Budziszewski
#7. If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.
J. Budziszewski
#8. Like other people, anthropologists may see only what they want to see, even when what they want to see is nothing.
J. Budziszewski
#9. When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.
J. Budziszewski
#10. 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.
J. Budziszewski
#11. 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 guess the reason why: After a certain amount of this, you may need to get drunk to go through with it.
J. Budziszewski
#12. As candle lights candle, [the spouses's] desire for each other kindles a desire for the Love of which their love is but a reflection.
J. Budziszewski
#13. 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 seriously people take you.
J. Budziszewski
#14. To penetrate the unknown, the mind must begin with what is known already. George Orwell wrote that "We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." This book is an attempt at re-statement.
J. Budziszewski
#15. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit.
J. Budziszewski
#16. morality would be undermined without a belief in divine judgment, but
J. Budziszewski
#17. 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 sin to guilty knowledge.
J. Budziszewski
#18. He is what He is and there was never a time when he wasn't.
J. Budziszewski
#19. 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 everything to rights, and faith that in the end, He will. Man can only ameliorate, not cure.
J. Budziszewski
#20. 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 of extinction.
J. Budziszewski
#21. How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we don't know it just from being told, we don't know it from the five senses, and we don't know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is underived.
J. Budziszewski
#22. Only good was created. Every evil thing is a good thing ruined. There are no other ways to get an evil thing.
J. Budziszewski
#23. Those who do not accept conscience as a teacher must face it as an accuser.
J. Budziszewski
#24. Even a liar's speech expresses something true; it may not tell us the state of the world, but it tells us the state of his heart.
J. Budziszewski
#25. In the same way, filling a cavity restores to the tooth its natural function of chewing. Healing does not transcend our nature; it respects it.
J. Budziszewski
#26. That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.
J. Budziszewski
#27. Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.
J. Budziszewski
#28. It is impossible to legislate without legislating morality. Try to think of a law that is not based on a moral idea; you won't be able to do it.
J. Budziszewski
#29. A marriage with Christ at the center of it pulls you right out of yourself. It teaches each partner, the husband and the wife, to forget about self for a while in care and sacrifice for the other. We come to ourselves by losing ourselves.
J. Budziszewski
#30. Depraved conscience turns out to be as different from genuine ignorance as it is from honest recognition.
J. Budziszewski
#31. A secular person treats as the Highest Standard something that isn't the Highest Standard.
J. Budziszewski
#32. I believe in civility. But it is not a requirement of civility to pretend there is no war.
J. Budziszewski
#33. Even in the West, moreover, although the ethical ideal has been absolute monogamy, the legal norm has been merely relative monogamy, which is also known as successive polygamy.
J. Budziszewski
#34. Pleasure comes naturally as a by-product of pursuing something else, like the good of another person, and the best way to ruin pleasure is to make it your goal.
J. Budziszewski
#35. [Traditions] give voice to what in some sense we already know, but inarticulately. When tradition is silenced, people have to work all these things out for themselves - and that is impossible.
J. Budziszewski
#36. It is not for nothing that the king of a commonwealth is called "Sire"; humanly speaking, of the callings of fatherhood and kingship, the deeper and more primordial is fatherhood.
J. Budziszewski
#37. To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him.
J. Budziszewski
#38. A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.
J. Budziszewski
#40. 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.
J. Budziszewski
#41. 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.
J. Budziszewski
#42. 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.
J. Budziszewski
#43. Natural function and personal meaning are not alien to each other, they are connected. In
J. Budziszewski
#44. In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: Multiply entities unnecessarily.
J. Budziszewski
#45. We may add that it is not an act of justice but of foolish injustice to pretend the sexes are the same. Justice is exercised in respectfully providing for the due needs of each.
J. Budziszewski
#46. 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.
J. Budziszewski
#47. from a Second Vatican Council document: "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man find true light.
J. Budziszewski
#48. Some seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. Others seek knowledge that they may themselves be known: that is vanity. But there are still others who seek knowledge in order to serve and edify others, and that is charity." The
J. Budziszewski
#49. The difficulty is that without a direct revelation from the Author of the law, it is impossible to know whether the possibility of forgiveness is real. Therefore
J. Budziszewski
#50. We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. GEORGE ORWELL
J. Budziszewski
#51. If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against God's inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused.
J. Budziszewski
#52. It is in the nature of love to bind itself";2 vows are love's native language. Love that is mute in the language of promises, though it may be called love, is not love but something else.
J. Budziszewski
#53. To many people today, however, rights are something to protect us against the demands of morality.
J. Budziszewski
#54. To be evil at all, Satan needs good things he can abuse, things like intelligence, power and will. Those good things come from God.
J. Budziszewski
#57. If it really were impossible to derive an ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine would make no sense. Natural
J. Budziszewski
#58. There are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve.
J. Budziszewski
#59. An unsound thinker goes where his motives and interests invite him; a sound thinker goes where the argument takes him.
J. Budziszewski
#60. The chief objection to playing God is that someone else is God already.
J. Budziszewski
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