Rocco Buttiglione Quotes

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.

Balancing the common good with the freedom and liberty to exercise that individuality has been and remains a challenge for those committed to democracy while understanding that the polis ensures our participation and therefore our citizenship.

We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

I want to see my kids grow up in a world that I grew up in, which was it had imagination and it had hope. And all of a sudden, I see that being dissolved, and I see, as a country, as a people, we are a republic. We are a democracy.

The Declaration of Independence says when government fails, the people have the right to replace it. Well, New York State government has failed and the people have the right, indeed the people have the the people have the obligation, to act.

A healthy democracy requires a decent society; it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant and respectful.

We are in a democratic society. It's our job to question.

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.

The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future.

My political beliefs are my moral, quasi-religious framework.

I would suggest that faith is everyone's business. The advance or decline of faith is so intimately connected to the welfare of a society that it should be of particular interest to a politician.

Every cook or every laborer cannot govern the state.

Republican government loses half its value where the moral and social duties are ... negligently practiced.

Protestant Christianity ... tutored the first generations of Americans. It provided what we today would call the value system of the society.

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons…. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this … work, that is its affair.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Most men, being the ruled, not the rulers, want good government. If, without constraint, they choose bad government, it is by mistake

I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.

What our children become, so becomes our nation. It is plain common sense to give our children the best education possible so that they can develop into productive responsible citizens contributing economically, socially and politically to our democratic society.

The American war is over; but this far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.

Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship... When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.

I believe that democracy is about values before it is about voting. These values must be nurtured within society and integrated into the electoral process itself.