"Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

"By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books."

~Juvenal

“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged today.”

~G.K. Chesterton

“On the stormy sea that is the world, God is a rock, on which the righteous are saved and the wicked break their boat.”

+St. Nikolaj Velimirovic

"Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, everything passes, but God remains the same. Patience reaches it all; he who has God lacks nothing."

+St. Teresa of Avila

"Our potlatch is one of baseness, shamelessness, obscenity, debasement and abjection. This is the whole movement of our culture - it is here that we raise the stakes. Our truth is always to be sought in unveiling, desublimation, reductive analysis -- it is the truth of the repressed, of exhibition, of confession, of laying bare. Nothing is true if it is not de-sacralized, objectivized, shorn of its aura, dragged on to the stage. Our potlatch is the potlatch of indifference -- an in-differentiation of values, but also an indifference to ourselves. If we cannot lay our own lives on the line, this is because we are already dead. And it is this indifference and abjection that we throw out to the others as a challenge: the challenge to debase themselves in their turn, to deny their own values, to lay themselves bare, to make their confessions, to own up -- in short, to respond with a nihilism equal to our own."

~Jean Baudrillard

“When authority comes from the people it is vacillating; when it comes from God it is steadfast. It is either beyond all question, or it is no authority at all. Such is the lesson of history.”

~Honoré de Balzac

"It is difficult to persuade mankind that the love of virtue is the love of themselves."

~Cicero

"If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in religion, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of atoms... I cannot understand how the thought of minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in trees "

~C.S. Lewis

"Today every passion that is not for money, pleasure or honor is called unreasonable and fanatical."

~Louis de Bonald

“Through all time, if we read aright, sin was, is, will be, the parent of misery.”

~Thomas Carlyle

'Whatever belongs to horror and to night, to disease, death and decay, whatever is crass, obscene and perverse, whatever is mechanical and a denial of the spirit—all these motifs and aspects of the inhuman take hold of man and of his familiar world. They make of man a ruin, an automaton, a mask, a phantom. He sinks to the level of a louse, an insect. In the various movements of modern painting it is always one or the other of these various anti-human attributes that is underlined. Cubism lays the emphasis on deadness, Expressionism on boiling chaos, Surrealism on the cold demonism of the last icy regions of Hell.' - Hans Sedlmayr

Above: Paul Klee, 'Moribundus' 1919

“The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.“

~Robert Nisbet

“All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief. But neither can religion subsist if severed from a healthy culture; no cultured person should remain indifferent to erosion of apprehension of the transcendent.”

~Russell Kirk

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage.”

~Alexander Fraser Tytler

“As between individuals, without a common idea there can be no true unity between peoples, and this common idea must be placed as highly as possible so that it can be seen from far around. By putting it too low, under the pretense of making it more accessible, it degrades the best, and only acknowledges the mediocre in their mediocrity. A high idea does not need to be understood by every citizen in order to be taken part of; it is enough for it to be in the air as it acts both directly and indirectly on our consciences.”

~Georges Bernanos

"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom... it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."

~Aldous Huxley

“Civilization is a discipline, an achievement in self-culture and self-control, and the only civilizing agent is a spirit manifesting itself through reason, imagination, and religious inspiration, and giving a sort of mintage to acts which would otherwise be without meaning.”

~Richard Weaver

"There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men's sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things."

~Fyodor Dostoyevsky