Marco Respinti Quotes

As the movie [The Book of Eli] teaches, words may have the power to convince and move if they are rich and meaningful, or the power to disappoint and let people down if they are poor and prosaic. Media use words to challenge power or to promote alternative powers, becoming either servants of the power, or watchdogs of the power, or another power themselves. All depend on the words that media choose to use: either the words of truth or the words of the yes-men and the servants of the powers that be.
...Truth is not limited to its material vessels.
Media have the power to mobilize for freedom of religion, belief, and creed of Tai Ji Men and all other persecuted groups because they are guardians of words, and words may contain truth. Media only need to start believing it, in Taiwan and all over the world.

Is there a risk that reducing the debate on religious liberty to different forms of state recognition, including the Italian “,” may implicitly or inadvertently confer to the state the power to grant to religious groups the right to exist? In practice, states do have such power in different countries. The question is whether giving such an authority to the state is morally and philosophically correct.
Perhaps, a state should just watch over the compliance of its citizens with the laws (assuming the laws are just), regardless of their religious persuasion, and leave religious groups alone to live and self-regulate their lives. The state is not the source of religious liberty, although it should acknowledge and protect it.

Religious freedom does not mean that all religions are the same: it means that truth matters, and this is what religion and the sense of the sacred are all about.
Every man and woman has the right to know the truth, but only full freedom allows them to progress in that direction.

Sin and evil will never be eradicated from humanity, but human beings have the moral duty to tame, contain, and battle sin as much as possible. Since politics is the art of governing people for that supreme goal that is good, let us hope that, on Taiwan’s Judicial Day, Taiwan’s politics would find a way to regain its independence from the wrongdoings of some of its branches and corrupt officials, and consider the solution of the Tai Ji Men case as a top priority.
Only in this way will Taiwan become a full-blown democracy.

…laws should always embody justice, otherwise justice becomes what laws arbitrarily decide it to be. And, as the Tai Ji Men case shows all too well after 29 years, and in this special year 2025, laws can sometimes be unjust.

People who suffered persecution, as well as their relatives and friends, know that while individuals can always change their hearts, and even the cruelest criminal may convert, structures based on evil principles can only either persevere in their wrongdoings or change their foundations and become something totally different.

[Civil] rights and democracy cannot be protected when independent media are routinely intimidated.

While violence is always something negative, force is the capacity and power to make the objects of will possible.
It has a fundamental moral side in the cognate term “fortitude,” which is one of the four cardinal virtues, or the hinge excellencies that are required for a virtuous life.

…all human beings are guardians of other fellow humans. Being the keeper of somebody else does not in fact mean stripping others of their liberty and right to self-determination.
It means to be always there, if and when needed—spiritually and, when possible, also materially.

The same truth we trust to finally prevail is the same truth [Freedom of Religion or Belief] is made of. Religions and spiritual ways are not all the same. What is the same is the honest spirit that animates all believers in different religions. What is really true of all religions, including religions that a believer in another religion may regard as false, is the afflatus for truth that motivates them. No matter how different beliefs and believers may be, no matter how many conflicts they may have between each other, that single element, a thirst and hunger for truth, makes them similar, make their devotees sisters and brothers, make them human and unique.

We cannot speak of [civil] rights without centering our attention on [the moral compass of] conscience, one among a few distinctive features that make humans human‒and humane.

French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), in his book “De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud,” published in 1965, coined the expression “school of suspicion” to describe the collective cultural aim of such famous authors as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While proclaiming very different and even opposite philosophies, in Ricœur’s view the ultimate attempt of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche was to teach that reality itself cannot be trusted and fundamentally lies, and that all existing authorities are false. As “masters” (or teachers) “of suspicion,” their credo was not the legitimate critique of existing authorities for their mistakes and misdeeds, but the basic delegitimization of the very concept of authority in itself.

Taxation imposed in an exaggerate, unjust, or unlawful way violates citizens’ fundamental rights to liberty and private property, and amounts to persecution, which is another name for violence.

…it is logically absurd to want to defend the environment by making humans suffer for this. In fact, the environment is for humans. As there can be no humans if the natural environment is inhospitable to life, an environment with no humans is not what all of us are interested in. …To function properly, [the society] needs to cherish the unalienable reality of its members. If someone considers a fellow human being or a group of humans or the whole of humanity as an enemy, a virus or a disease to be extirpated, societies become terrestrial hells. …From Tai Ji Men’s teachings one can in fact easily draw the idea that there can be no real care for the environment if there is no conscientious care for humans.

Peace is the most desirable of all human conditions. It is a promise of Paradise. When all human worries and griefs will be over, we will participate in the fullness of being with no unrest, anxiety, or disturbance. For believers, this is our ultimate goal. It is also part of our nature. Peace is our fate because peace is our origin. Our human nature is made out of peace, and peace is what we are made for. All troubles are in fact caused by the disruption of our original condition, which is both our origin and our destiny.
Peace is then quite a serious thing—something that may be cast in doubt today, if we consider how this precious word is too often misused.
Peace is the opposite of war, in a broader sense, but it is not just the absence of war.
...Only deeply peaceful men and women can build a truly pacific society, one that would be able to resist and last.