Christopher Dawson Quotes

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

In this context, the church supports and favors every effort today to seek the full development of the personality of all human beings, and to promote their fundamental rights, their dignity and liberty.

By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfillment of his potentialities as a human being.

There is no god. I am an atheist. It is up to us to become God. We need to be elevated, to become saints. God alienates people from themselves.

The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

The test of the worth of work is its effect on the worker. If it degrade him, it is bad; if it ennoble him, it is good.

The message of 'Star Trek,' if there is one, seems to be that we should try to live up to the very best that we're capable of.

We are under a moral obligation to do our best to realize the best that human beings can be. To neglect that obligation is to waste our lives.

It's degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that's trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what's really happening.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

We're all looking for the highest, fullest expression of ourselves as a human being.

You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

As one studies these preconditions, one becomes saddened by the ease with which human potentiality can be destroyed or repressed, so that a fully-human person can seem like a miracle, so improbable a happening as to be awe-inspiring. And simultaneously one is heartened by the fact that self-actualizing persons do in fact exist, that they are therefore possible, that the gauntlet of dangers can be run, that the finish line can be crossed.

For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility of every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed them, and turn them to social account.

True happiness for human beings is possible only to those who develop their godlike potentialities to the utmost.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

Man is what he wills himself to be.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.

The best kind of politics is when you help people become their own best selves.

It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right.

The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.

Adding more people causes problems. But people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.

It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise, we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak, Should we be less in deed than in desire?