Quote

Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.

Christopher Dawson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Christopher Dawson
Age: 80 †
Born: 1889
Born: October 12
Died: 1970
Died: May 25
Historian
Sociologist
Y Gelli Gandryll
Christopher Henry Dawson
Spiritual
Pieces
Rests
Fall
Principles
Inevitably
Makes
Literature
Appeal
Must
Moral
Appeals
Every
Society
Loyalty
Lasts
Recognition
Common
Ideals
Resort
Last
Members
Resorts

More quotes by Christopher Dawson

Image
Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
Christopher Dawson
Image
For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.
Christopher Dawson
Image
The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.
Christopher Dawson
Image
Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.
Christopher Dawson
Image
The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.
Christopher Dawson
Image
As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.
Christopher Dawson
Image
And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.
Christopher Dawson
Image
Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.
Christopher Dawson
Image
It is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life.
Christopher Dawson
Image
The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.
Christopher Dawson
Image
American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
Christopher Dawson
Image
Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.
Christopher Dawson
Image
The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.
Christopher Dawson
Image
Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature.
Christopher Dawson
Image
Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum
Christopher Dawson
Image
Faith transcends reason because divine truth is not only higher, but also wider than the human mind, and the rationalist in his haste for premature simplification always tends to shut his eyes to one aspect of the truth and to seek a false harmony of thought by the sacrifice of an essential element of reality.
Christopher Dawson
Image
The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with Augustine's earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?
Christopher Dawson
Image
The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms
Christopher Dawson
Image
No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced
Christopher Dawson
Image
It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.
Christopher Dawson