John Paul II

True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.

The future starts today, not tomorrow.

Know what you are talking about.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Faced with today's problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.

The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.

A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.

The term 'person' has been coined to signify that a man cannot be wholly contained within the concept 'individual member of the species', but that there is something more to him, a particular richness and perfection in the manner of his being, which can only be brought out by the use of the word 'person'.

Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.

God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man's free will. God does not redeem man against his will.

Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.

There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.

The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name

Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.

Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.

A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.

I plead with you--never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.