Here are some key quotes from Pope Francis’ Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future:

1. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that impact their lives.
2. Now, more than ever, what is revealed is the fallacy of making individualism the organizing principle of society.
3. We need a movement of people who know we need each other, who have a sense of responsibility to others and to the world. We need to proclaim that being kind, having faith, and working for the common good are great life goals that need courage and vigor; while glib superficiality and the mockery of ethics have done us no good.
4. It is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call.
5. We need to feel again that we need each other, that we have a responsibility for others, including for those not yet born and for those not yet deemed to be citizens.
6. This is a time to recover values, in the proper sense of the word: to return to what is authentically worthwhile. The value of life, of nature, of the dignity of the person, of work, of relationship—all these are values key to human life, which cannot be traded away or sacrificed. It amazes me when I hear people talk of “non-negotiable values.” All true values, human values, are non-negotiable.
7. Solidarity acknowledges our interconnectedness: we are creatures in relationship, with duties toward each other, and all are called to participate in society. That means welcoming the stranger, forgiving debts, giving a home to the disabled, and allowing other people’s dreams and hopes for a better life to become our own. But subsidiarity ensures that we do not distort the idea of solidarity, which involves recognizing and respecting the autonomy of others as subjects of their own destiny. The poor are not the objects of our good intentions but the subjects of change. We do not just act for the poor but with them, as Benedict XVI so well explained in the second part of his 2007 encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”).
8. To dream of a different future we need to choose fraternity over individualism as our organizing principle. Fraternity, the sense of belonging to each other and to the whole of humanity, is the capacity to come together and work together against a shared horizon of possibility.
9. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture which regards the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled, and the unborn as surplus to our well-being.
10. Just as what separates me from my brother and sister is my (and their) spirit of self-sufficiency and superiority, so what unites us is our shared insufficiency, our mutual dependence on God and on each other.
11. Calamities unmask our shared vulnerability and expose those false, superfluous securities around which we had organized our plans, routines, and priorities. They reveal our neglect of what nourishes and strengthens the life of the community, how we had shriveled within our bubbles of indifference and well-being.
12. For in spite of the constant social erosions, there persists in all peoples reserves of fundamental values: the struggle for life from conception to natural death, the defense of human dignity, a love of freedom, a concern for justice and creation, the love of family and fiesta.
13. This is why a Christian will always defend individual rights and freedoms but can never be an individualist. A Christian will love and serve her country with patriotic feeling, but cannot be merely a nationalist.
14. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone.
15. When the accumulation of wealth becomes our chief goal, whether as individuals or as an economy, we practice a form of idolatry that puts us in chains.