Conscience and Its Enemies Quotes

“Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins? No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Personal authenticity, in the classical understanding of liberal-arts education, consists in self-mastery—in placing reason in control of desire. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires—it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“It is the attitudes, habits, dispositions, imagination, ideology, values, and choices shaped by a culture in which pornography flourishes that will, in the end, deprive many children of what can without logical or moral strain be characterized as their right to a healthy sexuality. In a society in which sex is depersonalized, and thus degraded, even conscientious parents will have enormous difficulty transmitting to their children the capacity to view themselves and others as persons rather than objects of sexual desire and satisfaction.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“A few years ago, the wonderful documentary filmmaker Michael Pack and the no-less-wonderful historian-biographer Richard Brookhiser visited us at Princeton to offer an advance viewing of their film biography George Washington. Some of the students were a bit perplexed when Brookhiser explained that Washington came to be who he was by imagining an ideal, truly noble individual. As a young man, the future statesman formed a picture of the kind of person he would like to be and then tried to become that person by acting the way that person would act. He “stepped into the role” he had designed for himself. He sought to make himself virtuous by ridding himself of wayward desires or passions that would have no place in the character and life of the noble individual he sought to emulate and, by emulating, to become.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Our task should be to understand the moral truth and speak it in season and out of season. We will be told by the pure pragmatists that the public is too far gone in moral relativism or even moral delinquency to be reached by moral argument. But we must have faith that truth is luminously powerful, so that if we bear witness to the truth about, say, marriage and the sanctity of human life—lovingly, civilly, but also passionately and with determination—and if we honor the truth in advancing our positions, then even many of our fellow citizens who now find themselves on the other side of these issues will come around.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“At the heart of her doubts about secular liberalism (and what she described as “radical, upscale feminism”) was its embrace of abortion and its (continuing) dalliance with euthanasia. At first, she went along with abortion, albeit reluctantly, believing that women's rights to develop their talents and control their destinies required its legal availability. But Betsey (as she was known by her friends) was not one who could avert her eyes from inconvenient facts. The central fact about abortion is that it is the deliberate killing of a developing child in the womb. For Betsey, euphemisms such as “products of conception,” “termination of pregnancy,” “privacy,” and “choice” ultimately could not hide that fact. She came to see that to countenance abortion is not to respect women's “privacy” or liberty; it is to suppose that some people have the right to decide whether others will live or die. In a statement that she knew would inflame many on the Left and even cost her valued friendships, she declared that “no amount of past oppression can justify women's oppression of the most vulnerable among us.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Conscience as “self-will” is a matter of feeling or emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with identifying what one has a duty to do or not do, one's feelings and desires to the contrary notwithstanding, but rather with sorting out one's feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn't feel bad about doing it—or at least one doesn't feel so bad about doing it that one prefers the alternative of not doing it.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“we are rational animals, but we are imperfectly rational. We are prone to making intellectual and moral mistakes and capable of behaving grossly unreasonably—especially when deflected by powerful emotions that run contrary to the demands of reasonableness.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Although both my grandfathers encountered ethnic prejudice, they viewed this as an aberration—a failure of some Americans to live up to the nation's ideals. It did not dawn on them to blame the bad behavior of some Americans on America itself. On the contrary, America in their eyes was a land of unsurpassed blessing. It was a nation of which they were proud and happy to become citizens.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Art can elevate and ennoble. It can also degrade and even corrupt. Whatever should be done or not done by way of legal restriction of pornographic art, we ought not to make things easy on ourselves by pretending that art cannot be pornographic or that pornographic art cannot degrade. Nor ought we to avert our gaze from the peculiar insult and injustice involved in the government funding of pornography.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“When my liberal colleagues in higher education say, “You guys shouldn't be worried so much about these social issues, about abortion and marriage; you should be worrying about poverty,” I say, “If you were genuinely worried about poverty, you would be joining us in rebuilding the marriage culture.” Do you want to know why people are trapped in poverty in so many inner cities? The picture is complex, but undeniably a key element of it is the destruction of the family and the prevalence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and fatherlessness.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“The thoughts are to the desires,” Hobbes has taught them to suppose, “as scouts and spies, to range abroad and find the way to the thing desired.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Justice requires that all human beings irrespective of race or color, but also irrespective of age, or size, or stage of development, be afforded the protection of the laws. The common good requires that the laws reflect and promote a sound understanding of marriage as uniting one man and one woman in a bond founded on the bodily communion made possible by their reproductive complementarity.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Advocates of redefining “marriage” as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership to accommodate same-sex relationships are increasingly confirming the point that this shift erodes the basis for permanence and exclusivity in any relationship.1”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“Robust support for marital norms serves children, spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor. Family breakdown thrusts the state into roles for which it is ill-suited: parent and discipliner to the orphaned and neglected, and arbiter of disputes over custody and paternity.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“The basic goods of human nature are the goods of a rational creature—a creature who, unless impaired or prevented from doing so, naturally develops and exercises capacities for deliberation, judgment, and choice. These capacities are God-like—albeit, of course, in a limited way. In fact, from the theological vantage point they constitute a certain sharing—limited, to be sure, but real—in divine power. This is what is meant, I believe, by the otherwise extraordinarily puzzling biblical teaching that man is made in the very image and likeness of God.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“The freedom we must defend is freedom for the practice of these virtues. It is freedom for excellence, the freedom that enables us to master ourselves. It is a freedom that, far from being negated by rigorous standards of scholarship, demands them. It is not the freedom of “if it feels good, do it”; it is, rather, the freedom of self-transcendence, the freedom from slavery to self.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“The true liberal-arts ideal rejects the reduction of reason to the status of passion's ingenious servant. It is an ideal rooted in the conviction that there are human goods, and a common good, in light of which we have reasons to constrain, to limit, to regulate, and even to alter our desires.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism

“I would warn that limited government—considered as an ideal as vital to business as to the family—cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these things happen, the health, education, and welfare functions of the family will have to be undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or later be the government. To deal with pressing social problems, bureaucracies will grow, and with them the tax burden. Moreover, the growth of crime and other pathologies where family breakdown is rampant will result in the need for more extensive policing and incarceration and, again, increased taxes to pay for these government services. If we want limited government, as we should, and a level of taxation that is not unduly burdensome, we need healthy institutions of civil society, beginning with a flourishing marriage culture that supports family formation and preservation.”
― Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism