"Decoupling growth from is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."

"Restoration of peatlands is a low hanging fruit, and among the most cost-effective options for mitigating climate change."

"The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge."

"When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said."

"The day when efficacy would prevail over truth will never come for the Church, for then the gates of hell would have prevailed against her."

"It has never been recommended to confuse "loving" with "seeking to please"… ...Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist... ...she certainly did not envelop him in her love."

"It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist."

"For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word."

"In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block."

"To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs."

"The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher."

"It is not possible to escape from the results of the irruption of faith into the structures of our knowledge."

"The hope of the coming of a new Christian era in our civilization is to my mind a hope for a distant future, a very distant future."

"The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men."

"With all his sincerity and devotion, the authentic, absolute atheist is after all only an abortive saint, and at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist."

"To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love."

"Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomena."

"Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it."

"A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law."

"The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive."

"There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world."

"In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure."

"There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism."

"Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum."

"Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself."

"To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being."

"Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves."

"It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us."

"What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve."

"Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence."

"We have just seen that perfection and contemplation imply each other by reason of love which is at once the essence of perfecton and “the source, the execize and the end” of contemplation. One can also show this mutual implication by the stressing the fact that under the regime of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the state proper to perfection and to contemplation all at once. Saint Thomas teaches that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary for salvation, because we are too weak all by ourselves always to use as we should even the theological virtues and the infused moral virtues. […] For, as saint Bonavenure tell us, “the gifts immediately dispose one to contemplation”."

"A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me."

"The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies."

"The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet."

"Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community."

"In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality."

"In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom."

"If it is correct to say that there will always be rightist temperaments and leftist temperaments, it is nevertheless also correct to say that political philosophy is neither rightist nor leftist; it must simply be true."

"It is … undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which … was to be included in the . The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."

"For most countries, serving the UN's objectives has never seemed worth even the smallest of risks. Member nations do not want a large, reputable, strong and independent United Nations, no matter their hypocritical pronouncements otherwise. What they want is a weak, beholden, indebted scapegoat of an organization, which they can blame for their failures or steal victories from."

"I think the people in the field were magnificent. And they got the stories, and I put troops at risk to get their stories out every night. But the copy people and the editing people back home, they're the ones who put Tanya Harding on and O.J. Simpson, not the guys in the field."

"I know there is a God, because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God."

"I am still suffering from my experience in Rwanda, I never know when I'm going to drive my car off a bridge, or just decide to take my life."

"The possibility of starting a new program at the college — a military Cegep that would allow all officer cadets to spend two years in Saint-Jean before going to Kingston, instead of studying only in Kingston — is being considered. In the spirit of progress, would it be possible to support a principle as basic as the freedom of francophones in the Canadian Armed Forces by establishing a Cegep-style francophone bilingual military college."

"India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India."

"I was not blinded by faith, but the encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known....He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, "See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger.""

""It was as if he had heard what I wanted," she said. But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic."

"The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts."

"What is most important to me is Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of India, India as a pluralist society and polity, an idea which is central to India’s survival, which has held now in the four decades after his death and which is all the more in need of defending."

"India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay."