Quotes from Richard John Neuhaus

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.

Every day of the year is a good day to think more deeply about Good Friday, for Good Friday is the drama of the love by which our every day is sustained.

Religion as a human phenomenon is as riddled through with potential for both good and evil as any other phenomenon.

Respect for the dignity of others includes treating them as rational creatures capable of being persuadad by rational argument, even in the face of frequent evidence to the contrary.

Optimism is a matter optics, of seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don't want to see. Hope, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue. It is the unblinking acknowledgment of all that militates against hope, and the unrelenting refusal to despair. We have not the right to despair, and, finally, we have not the reason to despair

One must never underestimate the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.

Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.

Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.

In other words, every party will be permitted to contend for their truths so long as they acknowledge that they are their truths, and not the truth. Each will be permitted to propagandize, each will have to propagandize if it is to hold its own, because it is acknowledged that there is no common ground for the alternative to propaganda, which is reasonable persuasion.

On principle, we should be suspicious of explanations for other people's beliefs and behaviors when those explanations imply they would believe and behave as we do, if only the were as mature and enlightened as we are

Maundy Thursday is so called because that night, the night before he was betrayed, Jesus gave the command, the mandatum , that we should love one another. Not necessarily with the love of our desiring, but with a demanding love, even a demeaning love—as in washing the feet of faithless friends who will run away and leave you naked to your enemies.

Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.

All my life I have prayed to God that I should remain religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal and economically pragmatic.

My eyes are wide open to the conflicts within the Church, but I don't think you can call it schism.

My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.

In the absence of truth, power is the only game in town.

In the gay (Catholic) community, it would seem, the maxim is: love the sin and love the sinner, but hate anyone who calls it a sin or him a sinner.

If a church offers no truth that is not available in the general culture - in, for instance, the editorials of the New York Times or, for that matter, of National Review - there is not much reason to pay it attention.