Book Review: Fulton J. Sheen, On Being Human
Reflections on Life and Living
This book would be a great place to start reading Archbishop Sheen. Published posthumously, it’s a collection of short essays selected from among his many newspaper columns and articles, spanning the 1940s through the 1970s, and covering a wide range of topics. Every word is as relevant and true today as when it was written.
Excerpts
“If the mores of our time could be proven to be abnormal, then one need not be ashamed of his abnormality.”
“Minds today are no longer swayed by reason.”
“It used to be that the most popular biographies were the lives of good men for the sake of imitation, rather than scandals for the sake of making ourselves believe we are more virtuous.”
“Joy is inward; pleasure is outward.”
“A character is great, not by the ferocity of its hatred of evil, but by the intensity of its love of God.”
“The sad and tragic fact of our day is that many people in the world no longer want to be free.”
“Unless education can give teenagers a training of the will, many of them will slip into adulthood and become slaves of propaganda and public opinion the rest of their lives.”
“[The world] will not rise to peace and happiness through economic and political remedies alone; it will rise only through a spiritual regeneration of the hearts and souls of men.”
“God made the world in such a way that when we freely set ourselves in opposition to His Will certain consequences follow, and the calamity attendant upon defiance of Hs Will is what we call a judgment of God. … The alternative before men, therefore, is either to live under the one of God or else to live under His Justice and His judgment. It is under that latter that the world is in the present evil hour.”
“To leave God out of a university curriculum is to leave out the First Cause and the intelligibility of all that is.”
“Neither capital nor labor alone is always right in a dispute, because no class is always right simply because it is a class.”
“As a moral sense declines in a democracy, as freedom becomes equated with license, anarchy appears. Then it becomes necessary to suppress that anarchy with power.”
“Communism purchases equality at the cost of freedom.”
“The worst feature of capitalism is that it makes the economic the principal end of man; Communism says that the economic is the unique end of man.”
“Today men and nations fight not with ideas, but with words. A slogan endlessly repeated or an epithet repeatedly hurled is presumed to brainwash the need of further thinking.”
“What memory is to man, history is to civilization.”
“Nothing ever happens in the world which does not first happen inside man.”
“Modern man has become passive in the face of evil.”
“… we live in what might be called the ‘sensate age.’ In earlier centuries men lived by faith, then by reason, now on quivers and throbs.”
“Why is Communism so anxious to see the moral degeneracy of the United States? Because it produces chaos, and chaos is the door it enters to seize power.”
347 pages, available on Amazon.
