1001Philosophers

Jacques Maritain Quotes on Justice

Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the architects of the twentieth-century revival of Thomism. This page collects quotes attributed to Jacques Maritain on the topic of justice, drawn from across the philosopher's works.

Quotes

  • Attributed to Jacques Maritain:

    “Human rights are the rights of human beings as moral persons.”

  • Attributed to Jacques Maritain:

    “There is one human nature, common to all the diverse cultures of mankind.”

  • “The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943), p. 2.”

    In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.
  • “The Rights of Man (1945). London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 7–8.”

    Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.
  • “The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.”

    Action: the Perfection of Human Life,” Sewanee Review , LVI (Winter, 1948), pp. 3-4.