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The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.

Jacques Maritain

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Jacques Maritain
Age: 90 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 18
Died: 1973
Died: April 28
Diplomat
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Paris
France
Democracy
Modern
Democracies
Succeeded
Tragedy
Realizing

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There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
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Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon.
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It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.
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There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
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Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.
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The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
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The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love they cannot tolerate its defects.
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Power without authority is tyranny.
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The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.
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A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.
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With all his sincerity and devotion, the authentic, absolute atheist is after all only an abortive saint, and at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist.
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Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.
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In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.
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Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.
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We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
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There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
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To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.
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God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
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The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.
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