"The New Paganism, should it ever become universal, or over whatever districts or societies it may become general, will never be what the Old Paganism was. It will be other, because it will be a corruption. The Old Paganism was profoundly traditional; indeed, it had no roots except in tradition. Deep reverence for its own past and for the wisdom of its ancestry and pride therein were the very soul of the Old Paganism; that is why it formed so solid a foundation on which to build the Catholic Church, though that is also why it offered so long and determined a resistance to the growth of the Catholic Church. But the New Paganism has for its very essence contempt for tradition and contempt of ancestry. It respects perhaps nothing, but least of all does it respect the spirit of "Our fathers have told us."
The Old Paganism worshipped human things, but the noblest human things, particularly reason and the sense of beauty..."

"...In these it rose to heights greater than have since been reached, perhaps, and certainly to heights as great as were ever reached by mere reason or in the mere production of beauty during the Christian centuries.
But the New Paganism despises reason, and boasts that it is attacking beauty. It presents with pride music that is discordant, building that is repellent, pictures that are a mere chaos, and it ridicules the logical process, so that, as I have said, it has made of the very word "logical" a sort of sneer.
The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see. The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing..."

"...the other is declining towards a condition where the society it informs will be blind and deaf, even to the main natural pleasures of life and to temporal truths. It will be incapable of understanding what they are all about.
The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing... The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.
There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."

~Hilaire Belloc, The New Paganism

“There will come a time when it will be recognized that man does not live on horsepower and tools alone. There are also goods which he does not want to and cannot do without. And he will learn to economize, and he will not seek to win one thing, only to lose everything else with it. For if man had gained everything that could be gained with his technology, he would have come to the realization that life on the now disfigured earth—which has been made so excessively easy and simple—is actually no longer worth living; that we have indeed snatched everything that our planet had to give away, and in the process we have destroyed it, and thus ourselves, in this extractive work. Each one of us has to take care of his own part, so that the change may come before it is everywhere too late forever!”

~Paul Schultze-Naumburg

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."

"Opponents of Christianity will believe anything except Christianity."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Culture is a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically."

~Matthew Arnold

"Knowledge is given to us by faith, that is to say, by our participatory adherence to the presence of Him Who reveals Himself. Faith is therefore not a psychological attitude, a mere fidelity. It is an ontological relationship between man and God... This faculty is the personal existence of man, it is his nature made to assimilate itself to divine life – both mortified in their state of separation and death and vivified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge."

~Vladimir Lossky

"By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality and ostentation."

~Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Democracy is just a false idol – a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilisations."

~H.P. Lovecraft

“The greatest danger in the modern world is the attack on man as the image of God. That God became man in order to unite man to God is the only sure Divine underwriting of human worth."

~Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas

"There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other external; religious control and political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of external political control falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If civilized man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense."

~Juan Donoso Cortes

"The key to education is the experience of beauty."

~Friedrich Schiller

"To be a reactionary is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution."

~Nicolás Gómez Dávila

#Goethe #noble #order

"We need to be close to one another in Christian love, or worldly forces would isolate us and have us believe that we are alone and dependant upon secular forces, which would make us slaves to their godless and murderous agenda."

~Cardinal Burke

“An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbagefield that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system—Republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can't do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.”

"The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man does for himself and by himself."

~G.K. Chesterton

"The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith."

~Christopher Dawson

"Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.”

~Russel Kirk