Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher, and was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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- There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
- True Humanism (1938), p. xi
- In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
- True Humanism (1938), p. xv
- 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.
- The Rights of Man (1945). London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 7–8
- 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.
- “Action: the Perfection of Human Life,” Sewanee Review, LVI (Winter, 1948), pp. 3-4
- Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.
- The Range of Reason (1952). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 106
- 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 Range of Reason (1952), p. 217
