Christopher Dawson Quotes

• You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Give, Something, Conditions

• Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Christian, Movement, Humanists

• Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolution, Himself, American

• Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sociology, Ethics

• This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Freedom, Political, Common

• The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Strong, Nations, Control

• The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Present, Great

• The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Spiritual, Political

• The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Knowledge

  Tags in Political, Exchange, Between

• The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Greatest, Understanding

• The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Capable, Principle

• No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Change, Intellectually

• No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Passion, Civilization, Revolutions

• Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Positive

  Tags in Strong, Opinion, Religions

• Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Political, Means, Really

• Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feeling, Dependence, Supernatural

• It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in True, Human, Culture

• It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Impossible, Supernatural

• It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Human, Christian

• If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.

  Christopher Dawson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Satisfied, Existence

Christopher Dawson (30)

Birth:	12th October, 1889
Death:	25th May, 1970
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Historian

About

Christopher Henry Dawson was a British historian, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom. He has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century". He was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. He began publishing articles in The Sociological Review, in 1920. His first book, The Age of the Gods, was apparently intended as the first of a set of five tracing European civilisation down to the twentieth century; but this schematic plan was not followed to a conclusion.

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