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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
Democracies
Succeeded
Tragedy
Realizing
Democracy
Modern

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A true Christian is a man who never for a moment forgets what God has done for him in Christ and whose whole comportment and whose activity have their root in the sentiment of gratitude.
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Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
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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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The aim of education is to guide young persons in the process through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.
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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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In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
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If it is correct to say that there will always be rightist temperaments and leftist temperaments, it is nevertheless also correct to say that political philosophy is neither rightist nor leftist it must simply be true .
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To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
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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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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 spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy that without it there is no philosophy and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.
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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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Some truths are seen better through tears.
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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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The day when efficacy would prevail over truth will never come for the Church, for then the gates of hell would have prevailed against her.
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There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
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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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The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.
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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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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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