Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

John Courtney Murray

American Jesuit Priest and Theologian

"Power can be invested with a sense of direction only by moral principles. It is the function of morality to command the use of power, to forbid it, to limit it."

"Whereas the old morality saw things as so simple that moral judgment was always easy, the new morality sees things so complicated that moral judgment becomes practically impossible."

"The right to religious freedom has its foundation, not in the church or society or the state, but in the very dignity of the human person."

"Truth is an affair of history and is affected by all the relativities of history. Truth is an affair of the human subject. Truth, therefore, is an affair of experience. The question of truth as possessed brings into the whole problem the question the human person who must personally possess truth... And in the perception of truth the human intelligence has a function that must be conceived as being creative. This is the truth in the philosophical error of idealism. Somehow the mind creates truth in a sense. There is a truth here as there is in all errors."

"The question is not how certain is that truth out there. The question is what does it mean, and above all, what does it mean to me."