Michael Novak's Quotes

Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice.

We really feel happier when things look bleak. Hope is endurance. Hope is holding on and going on and trusting in the Lord.

Our Founders always wondered about how long it would last. The price of liberty is everlasting vigilance. You've got to be on your guard every minute or you will lose it.

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.

Even rock stars are entitled to privacy.

If you've ever been in a position in your life where you just can't take any more, you just have to get through the next second, and the next second after that.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

In God's eyes, there's not before and after. Every moment of time is simultaneous to God.

Individual freedom is a Jewish idea, but it's one of the functions of Christianity to make this idea universal.

Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn.

Not all of those who cry 'The poor, the poor!' will enter the kingdom of heaven.

The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question.

The universe moves in the direction of Liberty.

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.

Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.

Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.

You're a sovereign as a citizen. If you're not involved in your government, you're not doing your job. In the long run that's very bad for the Republic.