He Said It - Quotes from Pope John Paul II

Man always travels along precipices. His truest obligation is to keep his balance.

The Holy Land needs bridges, not walls.

Anything done for another is done for oneself.

Stupidity is also a gift from God, but one mustn't misuse it.

The truth is not always the same as a majority decision.

I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

I hope to have communion with the people, that is the most important thing.

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.

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

Modern Society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyles.

Work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons.

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

You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.

To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.

The United Nations organization has proclaimed 1979 as the Year of the Child. Are the children to receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?

The fear of making permanent commitments can change the mutual love of husband and wife into two loves of self-two loves existing side by side, until they end in separation.

[I kiss the soil] as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother, for the homeland is our earthly mother. I consider it my duty to be with my compatriots in this sublime and difficult moment.

God endowed [the human race] with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face.

The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's inner maturity; it is the expression of his personal dignity.

The enemy of the human race...invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people.

It is not credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it.

What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.

Radical changes in world politics leave America with a heightened responsibility to be, for the world, an example of a genuinely free, democratic, just and humane society.

Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence, I entrust them to you in the way that you know best.

The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.

When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society."

You are priests, not social or political leaders. Let us not be under the illusion that we are serving the Gospel through an exaggerated interest in the wide field of temporal problems.

Want more? Click here

E-mail this article to a friend