What We Can't Not Know Quotes

“We may add that it is not an act of justice but of foolish injustice to pretend the sexes are the same. Justice is exercised in respectfully providing for the due needs of each.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“I believe in civility. But it is not a requirement of civility to pretend there is no war.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Only good was created. Every evil thing is a good thing ruined. There are no other ways to get an evil thing.”
― J Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of "playing fair."

"Does he? Try making up your own idea of what's fair--say, "giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers"--and see how seriously people take you.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“To penetrate the unknown, the mind must begin with what is known already. George Orwell wrote that "We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." This book is an attempt at re-statement.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“In the same way, filling a cavity restores to the tooth its natural function of chewing. Healing does not transcend our nature; it respects it.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: "Multiply entities unnecessarily.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition "All meaning is relative" would be relative. Therefore the proposition "All meaning is relative" destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Even a liar's speech expresses something true; it may not tell us the state of the world, but it tells us the state of his heart.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“I mention this only because it seems to be a real obstacle for contemporary people. We don’t want the freedom of the creature but the freedom of the Creator—not freedom to be good but freedom to determine the good. Maybe this is not so new after all, for it was the first temptation: to be “like God, knowing good and evil”.”
― J Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Why is there something, rather than nothing?” is a question that anyone can ask.”
― J Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Friedrich Nietzsche, originator of the slogan “God is dead”, reported that at times he was overcome by gratitude. This admission is most interesting, because gratitude is not a self-regarding attitude like pleasure, but an other-regarding attitude like anger. It presupposes someone to whom gratitude is owed.”
― J Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“As there is something in our design like Furies to drive us down, so there is something in our design like Angels to help us up. If it were not so, we could not even be told about it. Yet we can. The indestructibility of our longing for lightness, for purity, for music is like a small star of hope in a darkened sky, an inkling of the Star that rules the day.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Those who seek the good have a permanent advantage in the ultimately inescapable human moral design. They have a greater advantage in the indestructibility of that part of the design called deep conscience, which, like a signal buoy, keeps rising. And they have an illimitable advantage in the Designer Himself, who is not a remote intelligence but a God who hears their prayers, cannot be defeated or caught by surprise, and acts beyond apparent defeats in ways they do not see.

Perhaps their greatest permanent disadvantage is that through the sheer horror of devastation, their opponents can tempt them to despair. This is a burden. But they have a permanent advantage in the virtue Saint Paul calls hope, for their confidence, unlike the bravado of their opponents, is not presumption; it does not rest in their own small strength, but in the strength of the one whom they serve.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“We are put together in such a way that although we can be pushed and pulled and drowsied by flickering images, we cannot be satisfied by them; we know too much even in oblivion. Fallow knowledge troubles our sleep. We lie under the prickling enchantment of the image carved into our hearts, which is stronger than the counterspell and can never be quite scratched out.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we don't know it just from being told, we don't know it from the five senses, and we don't know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is "underived.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own, through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God--through certainty that only God can set everything to rights, and faith that in the end, He will. Man can only ameliorate, not cure.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“The chief objection to playing God is that someone else is God already.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Even in the West, moreover, although the ethical ideal has been absolute monogamy, the legal norm has been merely relative monogamy, which is also known as successive polygamy.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Like other people, anthropologists may see only what they want to see, even when what they want to see is nothing.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide