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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

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Christopher Dawson
Age: 80 †
Born: 1889
Born: October 12
Died: 1970
Died: May 25
Historian
Sociologist
Y Gelli Gandryll
Christopher Henry Dawson
Great
Force
Higher
Sanctions
Lost
Cities
Earthly
Moments
Justice
Kingdom
Ends
Came
Kingdoms
Magnum
Power
Law
Claims
Sanction
States
State
Conflict
Augustine
Without
Interest
Became
Robbery
Self
Moment
City
Identified

More quotes by Christopher Dawson

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The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for
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The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.
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The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.
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If man attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unexpected and unpleasant ways to take its revenge.
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Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.
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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.
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Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.
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It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole
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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.
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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
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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
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It is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life.
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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
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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
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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.
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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