"But to love that good according to itself, that it may remain and be shared and that nothing be done against this good, this gives to a person the right relation to that society of the blessed. And this is love [caritas] which loves God for his sake and neighbors"

"The temporal common good is thus subordinate to the eternal common good, and the temporal rulers are subordinate to the hierarchy of the Church."

"before the second coming, the City of God is present in a hidden and partial way here on earth in the Church militant. In this temporal life, we do not yet have the vision of the divine essence, but we know God through the theological virtue of faith and love Him with the same love that we will have in Heaven."

"authority of the polity is derived from God because it is derived from the common good. The primary intrinsic common good of the polity is the unity of order, peace."

"so it is natural for many villages to come together to form a city (πόλις), a complete or perfect society, which does not depend on any greater society to help it achieve its ends. Such complete societies (which we can call ‘polities’ or ‘commonwealths’) take many forms in different times and places, but they always include some kind of rule ordering them to the common good."

"the greatest natural human activity is the activity of philosophical contemplation, whereby persons can transcend the temporal world and attain to eternal truths, and finally to the ultimate cause of all things."

"any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended."

"There are certain common goods to which a family can attain: the common celebration of feasts, certain truths, the beauties of music, dance, and so on, and above all the tranquility of order of its own life... A family is thus in another sense incomplete, as it is naturally ordered to a greater society that enables it to achieve its own common goods better and to share in other, greater common goods."

"begins to see that his whole life is bound up with others in a political society in which great common goods, such as justice, can be realized, in which people hold each other accountable for what they do... and in which a governing authority orders them."

"true common goods are honorable goods. Goods such as truth, justice, peace are common goods in the full sense. They are not diminished by being shared. Moreover they are not ordered to us; we are ordered to them. One desires to promote justice and truth for their own sakes. And they are better than private goods. It is honorable to attain a good for one man, but it is better and more godlike to attain a good in which many can share (cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1094b)."