Pius XI Quotes

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

If you know something is morally reprehensible, then it is your moral obligation to stop it as soon as possible.

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.

We are each of us responsible for the evil we may have prevented.

Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.

He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.

And if we can accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?

The baby's life is never willfully destroyed because the mother's life is in danger.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

Necessity may render a doubtful act innocent, but it cannot make it praiseworthy

With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

If we're being told to do stupid or cruel things, then it is morally correct to disobey.

The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.

What could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are dealing with here. Whether inflicted upon the mother or upon the child, it is against the precept of God and the law of nature: 'Thou shalt not kill.'

A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.

Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility toward truth is one of its attributes.

I learned from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.

I felt I had a responsibility to do the right thing. And then I wanted to do the right thing by my family and there was no handbook.

Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.