"You don't believe what you read in the papers about anything else; why do you believe it about the pope?" That's where I'd start.

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.

In the Church the transformative power of the Eucharist is experienced through the dignified celebration of Holy Mass, and people are empowered for mission because of that.

The Church offers the medicine of the divine mercy so that healed souls can grasp the truth that will liberate them in the fullest meaning of human freedom.

Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.

The world needs a pastor, whether it knows it or not.

The papacy is an impossible job. So the best thing Catholics can do for the pope is to pray for him.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have lethal consequences.

In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.

[Jesus Christ to Pope Francis] is the Lord with whom he speaks for hours every day in prayer. The Risen One who reached out, touched his life, and called him into mission.

The emphasis on the "peripheries" is also a distinctively "Franciscan" way of expressing the pope's respect for untutored popular piety - a respect, I might add, that was shared by St. John Paul II.

He thought of hanging himself, to pass the time.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

I've just always written, and always considered myself a writer. I wrote my first story when I was five. There was nothing else I wanted to do or be.

In order to protect himself from force, man was obliged to submit to justice. Justice or force: he was compelled to choose between the two masters, so little are we made to be independent.

Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.

Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.

Human happiness has always its abatements; the brightest sunshine of success is not without a cloud.

Yeah, spray tans are not for me.

O Christian! do not falter, The harvest field is white, And many souls are sinking Into eternal night.