Cardinals

"So everyone, through Christ and with Him and in Him, must fulfil the Old Testament in himself. Only then have we passed from the kingdom of the shadows of the Old Testament into the kingdom of the light of the Gospel, from the letter of the service of God to the spirit of Divine sonship, from Judaism to Christianity..."

"The people of Israel, through the Mother of the Saviour, were kinsmen of Christ. But in the kingdom of God ties of blood are not sufficient... Christ, therefore, rejects the ties of blood ; He demands the tie of faith, the hearing of the word of God. Whoever is united with Christ by baptism and by living faith is mother or brother to Him. So the question is not : Was Christ a Jew or an Aryan ? It is : Are we members of Christ by baptism and by faith ? For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision ; but a new creature (Gal. vi, 15)."

"The German classics honoured the Scriptures of the Old Testament... If we are to repudiate the Old Testament and banish it from our schools and from our national libraries, then we must disown our German classics. We must cancel many phrases from the German language... We must disown the intellectual history of our nation."

"Cardinal Manning once said to the Jews : * I should not understand my own religion, had I no reverence for yours. Let us venerate the Scriptures of the Old Testament! And let us not allow Bible history to be abolished in our schools !"

"Let us venerate the Scriptures of the Old Testament... By accepting these books Christianity does not become a Jewish religion. These books were not composed by Jews; they are inspired by the Holy Ghost, and therefore they are the word of God, they are God's books. [-] Antagonism to the Jews of today must not be extended to the books of pre-Christian Judaism."

"In the Gospel of the New Testament the ancient conception of God is perfected and fulfilled... The same God who spoke from the bush on Mount Horeb had now appeared visibly in the Person of Emmanuel, God with us... The God of the New Testament is not a different God from the God of the Old."

"...among no people of the pre-Christian era do we find so great a number of intellectually prominent men who, by their words and by their whole personality, have devoted themselves to the religious guidance of their nation, as among the people of the early Bible... our Germanists would do well to notice... the science of religions is able to make the comparison; and to the people of Israel it will award this certificate: You have excelled them all by the sublimity of your religion..."

"So that I may be perfectly clear... Before the death of Christ during the period between the calling of Abraham and the fullness of time, the people of Israel were the vehicle of Divine Revelation. The Spirit of God raised up and enlightened men who by the law, the Mosaic Thorah, regulated their religious and civil life, by the Psalms provided them with a prayer book for family devotion and a hymn-book... It is only with this Israel of the early biblical period that I shall deal in my Advent sermons. After the death of Christ Israel was dismissed from the service of Revelation."

"...a demand was raised for the total separation of Judaism from Christianity, and for the complete elimination from Christianity of all Jewish elements... To-day these single voices have swelled together into a chorus : Away with the Old Testament! A Christianity which still clings to the Old Testament is a Jewish religion, irreconcilable with the spirit of the German people... Even the Person of Christ is not spared by this religious revolution. Some have indeed tried to save Him with a forged birth-certificate, and have said that He was not a Jew at all but an Aryan... But so long as historical, sources count for more than surmise, there can be no doubt about the fact. The first chapter of the first gospel gives us the genealogy of Jesus... And so others now take up the cry : Then we must renounce Him, if He was a Jew...""

"All human conflict is ultimately theological."

"Necessity knows no law, and the starving man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread."

"In an address before the "Academia," which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as "a brutal philosophy—to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam." …These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several years."

"Twenty errors in practice are as nothing compared with one error in principle. Twenty errors in practice may be corrected, and the twenty-first may never be committed; but one erroneous principle is like a damaged wheel in a machine. It can never work correctly afterwards. One speculative error will produce an infinite series of practical errors. The series is inexhaustible, until the machine itself is either amended or destroyed."

"Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him."

"There are only two centres, God and ourselves; and we must rest on one or on the other."

"As a dogma, theologians teach that many belong to the Church who are out of its visible unity; as a moral truth that to be out of the Church is no personal sin, except to those who sin in being out of it. That is, they will be lost, not because they are geographically out of it, but because they are culpably out of it."

"What is dogma but the intellectual conception and verbal expression of a divine truth?"

"Now it is certain, by the voice of all mankind, that God speaks to us through His works—that He whispers to us through our natural conscience—that He attracts us to Him by instincts, and desires, and aspirations after a happiness higher than sense, and more enduring, more changeless, than this mortal life. God speaks to us articulately in the stirring life of nature, and in the silence of our own being."

"Our character is our will; for what we will we are."

"God knows that I would rather stand in the lowest place within the Truth, than in the highest without it. Nay, outside the Truth the higher the worse. It is only so much more opposition to Truth, so much more propagation of falsehood."

"No ignorance of truth is a personal sin before God, except that ignorance which springs from personal sin."

"The softness, and the glare, and the temptations, and the licence, and the lax examples about us, are more seducing and dangerous than the winter of penal laws. They hardened the manhood of Catholic parents. The summer sun relaxes many."

"A necessity of my reason constrains me to believe the existence of God, because I can in no other way account for my own existence.… I know that I am. I am either uncaused, or self-caused, or caused by a cause."

"Aut Caesar, aut nihil."

"What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes?"

"The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche's 'evolutionism' is his glorification of the warrior -- particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal 'spoilt brat' like Cesare Borgia."

"Saturday evening the Duke Valentino arrived here, having come by estafette; His gracious majesty very cheerfully greeted and embraced him and conducted him to the Castle, where he gave him the room nearest to his own, he himself speeding supper and ordering several courses, and that evening three or four times he went to the room even in his nightshirt when he was going to bed. And he insisted on giving the Duke his own shirts and gowns and clothes to wear, the Duke Valentino not having as many waggons as he has horses. In one word, one could not do more for a son or a brother."

"The princes of the Italian Renaissance routinely used intrigue, treachery, and murder to further their aims. The most notorious among them were the Borgias, whose despotic rule of church and state made a lasting impression. Their leader, Pope Alexander VI, was a greedy and lecherous reprobate. His daughter Lucrezia gained an undeserved reputation for poisoning and incest, and her cold-blooded brother Cesare stopped at nothing to gain and increase power. Together, they terrorized Rome and expanded its domain. Their enterprise collapsed when Alexander Vi died, possibly by poisoning."

"The object of his campaign has not been to tyrannise, but to extirpate tyrants."

"This government of yours does not please me, and I cannot trust it; you must change it and give me a pledge that you will observe everything you promised; otherwise you will soon realize that I do not want to live this way; and I will not ...my friend ...my enemy."

"This is what I wanted to tell Monsignor di Volterra [Soderini] when he came to Urbino, but I could not entrust him with the secret. Now that my opportunity has come, I have known very well how to make use of it, and I have done a great service to your masters."

"Ah! Falso ribaldo!"

"There is no city, country-side, or castle, nor any place in all Romagna, nor officer or minister of the duke's, who does not know of these abuses; and, amongst others, the famine of wheat occasioned by the traffic which he held against our express prohibition, sending out such quantities as would abundantly have sufficed for the people and the army."

"Without any sign of alteration."

"senza segno d'alterazione alcuna"

"However much Rome may be in the habit of speaking and writing, for my own part, I shall give these libellers a lesson in good manners."

"Your brother, Cesar de Borgia, Elect of Valencia"

"Diet of bankrupts... To-day, Messer Paolo is to visit me, and to-morrow there will be the cardinal; and thus they think to befool me, at their pleasure. But I, on my side, am only dallying with them. I listen to all they have to say and bide my own time."

"The constellations this year seem unfavourable to rebels.""

"[I] had not forgotten the way to reconquer it [Urbino]."

"A matter which would be easily accomplished, as the best men of that State have already offered themselves to me."

"Most Illustrious and most Excellent Lady, our very dear Sister,- Confident of the circumstance that there can be no more efficacious and salutary medicine for the indisposition from which you are at present suffering than the announcement of good and happy news, we advise you that at this very moment we have received sure tidings of the capture of Camerino. We beg that you will do honour to this message by an immediate improvement, and inform us of it, because, tormented as we are to know you so ill, nothing, not even this felicitous event, can suffice to afford us pleasure. We beg you also kindly to convey the present to the Illustrious Lord Don Alfonso, your husband and our beloved Brother-in-law, to whom we are not writing to-day."

"To all our Lieutenants, Castellains, Captains, Condottieri, Officers, Soldiers and Subjects, to whom these presents may be known, we commit and command that to our Most Excellent and Most Beloved Private Architect and General Engineer Leonardo Vinci, bearer of the same, and who has our Commission to survey the holds and fortresses of our States, in order that according to their exigencies and his judgment we may equip them, they are to give free pass, exempt from all public toll to himself and his company, and friendly reception; and to allow him to see, measure and estimate all he may wish. And to this effect they shall order men on his requisition and lend him all the help, assistance and favours he may request, it being our wish that for all works to be done in our Dominions any engineer be compelled to consult him and to conform to his opinion ; and to this may none presume to act in opposition, if it be his pleasure not to incur our indignation."

"I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that’s unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That’s my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it."

"I was born Jewish. I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aaron. Having become Christian by faith and baptism, I have remained Jewish. As did the Apostles."

"In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

"Once for some dreary and self-denying purpose I read many books on education—not method, which is not my concern, or the psychology of childhood, which interests me deeply, but Education with a big E. I came to the conclusion that if two were kept, the rest might, with no loss to humanity and possibly some advantage, be pulped... One of these books is Aristotle's Ethics, and the other is Newman's nine discourses on The Idea of a University."

"Starting from probabilities, we can construct sufficient legitimate evidence to provide certainty."

"For all the complicating effect of its religious setting, there is still no more eloquent and finely judged defence of intellectual culture than Newman's [in The Idea of a University]."

"Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not only scholars but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat.""