George Weigel Quotes & Sayings

Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible - and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto. — George Weigel

Homo voluntatis cannot explain why some things that can be done should not be done. — George Weigel

Freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way. — George Weigel

Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy. — George Weigel

Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes ... — George Weigel

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have lethal consequences. — George Weigel

History is driven, over the long haul, by culture - by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on. — George Weigel

The real challenge the rich young man faced was not just giving up his possessions, but giving up himself. The last command Jesus says ("Come, follow me") is the one that we so often overlook and think that he must have left Jesus simply because he liked his green bills. — George Weigel

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world". — George Weigel

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly. — George Weigel

A theological time bomb, set to go off with dramatic consequences. — George Weigel

Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses - or with a new set of ideological filters. — George Weigel

In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality ... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time. — George Weigel