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What We Can't Not Know: A Guide QUOTES

What We Can't Not Know: A Guide QUOTES

1 " When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts. "

― J. Budziszewski , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

2 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

3 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

4 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

5 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

6 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

7 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

8 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

9 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

10 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

11 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

12 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

13 " If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against God's inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused. "

― J. Budziszewski , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

14 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

15 " 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 is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people. "

― J. Budziszewski , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

16 " We are put together in such a way that although we can be pushed and pulled and drowsied by flickering images, we cannot be satisfied by them; we know too much even in oblivion. Fallow knowledge troubles our sleep. We lie under the prickling enchantment of the image carved into our hearts, which is stronger than the counterspell and can never be quite scratched out. "

― J. Budziszewski , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

17 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

18 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

19 " 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 , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

20 " Like other people, anthropologists may see only what they want to see, even when what they want to see is nothing. "

― J. Budziszewski , What We Can't Not Know: A Guide