The City

“A good culture of building almost certainly requires an understanding of man as an intermediate being: simultaneously part of, different from, and responsible for nature.”

“We might say, in Aristotelian terms, that the political animal is prior in potency, but the city is prior in act.”

“The biblical God is the city’s conditor because he created the conditions that made it possible, conditions which must continue to govern this human efflorescence that is the city, precisely if we want it to remain human.”

“It seems that the cities in O’Connor’s stories are there precisely in order to alert us to something that concerns us all. The modern megalopolis, after all, is our invention and, as with all inventions, it tells us something about its inventors.”

“For Augustine, language is social from start to finish, from its acquisition to its perfection.”

“[S]olitude becomes the principal catalyst of mission.”

“Each tiny act is an extraordinary event, in which heaven is given to us, in which we are able to give heaven to others.”

“If we are responsible that men have lost God, then yes, we should perhaps suffer; but above all we should give them back God.”

“A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.”