Michael Novak
Michael Novak
Michael Novakis an American Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. The author of more than twenty-five books on the philosophy and theology of culture, Novak is most widely known for his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. In 1993 Novak was honored with an honorary doctorate degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquín due to his commitment to the idea of liberty. In 1994 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which included a million-dollar purse awarded at Buckingham...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth9 September 1933
CountryUnited States of America
Sports is, somehow, a religion.
Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.
It is almost inconceivable that citizens of that time were willing to support so bloody a war, by putting so high a price upon Union and Liberty.
Even rock stars are entitled to privacy.
Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits
The most critical threat to our freedom is a failure to appreciate the power of truth.
Unity in diversity is the highest possible attainment of a civilization, a testimony to the most noble possibilities of the human race. This attainment is made possible through passionate concern for choice, in an atmosphere of social trust.
Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.
No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless. Except for the fragments of faith (in progress, in compassion, in conscience, in hope) to which it still clings, illegitimately, such a culture teaches every one of its children that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Marriage, the family unit, was the "original Department of Health, Education and Welfare."
There is an alternative to terror. It is called, in the political order, democracy. In the economic order, it is called the dynamic enterprise economy. (...) It empowers poor people from the bottom up. (...) A dynamic economic sector is the poor's best hope of escaping the prison of poverty. It is the only system so far known to human beings to take poor people and make them, quite soon, middle class, and some of them even (horrors!) rich.
To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.
In The Federalist, James Madison called the rage for equality 'a wicked project.' People differ and rewards differ-that's the essence of both liberty and justice. No nation that rewards effort, talent, inventiveness and luck can even pretend to cherish equal outcomes. In an inventive and dynamic society, equal (even relatively equal) incomes can be achieved only by abandoning liberty for tyranny.
We really feel happier when things look bleak. Hope is endurance. Hope is holding on and going on and trusting in the Lord.