#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

"For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own... In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt."

~Thomas Carlyle

#Burke #ancestors #posterity #tradition

"An interesting thesis is that the one and only fully concrete being is God, call this the thesis of Divine Concreteness. The idea would be that God is not only the most fundamental being there can be but also the most fundamental information, or the most informational being, there can be and, as such, by virtue of the above idea of concreteness being measured by determinateness, or how much information it carries with respect to properties, God would thereby also be the most concrete being there can be. God would be the one and only fully concrete being, or the limit-point of concreteness."

~Einar Duenger Bøhn

"If the Philokalia is 'the love of the beautiful', let us remember that the "beautiful" one is none other than the Lord Jesus. In the world there has been only one positively beautiful person - Christ. Therefore, the appearance of this wonderful, infinitely beautiful person is in itself an infinite miracle. The entire Gospel of John is devoted to precisely this. In it, St. John declares that the whole miracle is in the incarnation alone, in the very manifestation or emergence of the beautiful."

“All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one... There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.”

~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Modem society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.”

~Alasdair MacIntyre

"Everywhere in the modern world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.”

~Jacques Maritain

“Liberalism is, on one hand, the regime without faith, the regime that hands over everything, even the essentials of the country’s destiny, to free discussion. For Liberalism, nothing is absolutely true or false. The truth is, in each case, what the greater number of votes say. Thus, it does not matter to Liberalism if a people agrees upon suicide, provided that the proposed suicide is carried out in accordance with electoral practice. And since for the functioning of electoral practice the existence of factions must be encouraged and strife between them must be stimulated, the Liberal system is the system of permanent disunion, permanent want of popular faith in any profound community of destiny.”

~José Antonio Primo de Rivera

"A society formed on a legal basis always carries within itself the seeds of its own decay, for it guards materialism and egoism which constantly corrodes all unity. The fate of the tower of Babel is the fate of legal society. In such a society there must frequently occur a “confusion of tongues” when people stop understanding each other even though they speak the same language. Legal order then gives place to terrible disorder."

~Archbishop Ilarion of Russia

#Soto #rights #duties

"The Western Church did not come to the barbarians with a civilizing mission or any conscious hopes of social progress, but with a tremendous message of divine judgment and divine salvation. Humanity was born under a curse, enslaved by the dark powers of cosmic evil and sinking ever deeper under the burden of its own guilt. Only by way of the Cross and by the grace of the crucified Redeemer was it possible for men to extricate themselves from the massa damnata of unregenerate humanity and escape from the wreckage of a doomed world."

~Christopher Dawson

"I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden."

+Saint Augustine

"What good does it do me if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? There are some nations whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry..."

"...They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license. When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects."

~Alexis de Tocqueville

"A word that rose to honor at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarized in advance the whole program of modern civilization is 'humanism'. Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence... Humanism was form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy."

~René Guénon

“While traditional man roots meaning in transcendence, the worldly man perceives meaning in predominantly materialistic ways. He compensates for his lack of verticality by an excessive horizontality. Lacking quality, he searches for meaning in predominantly quantitative terms. What he lacks in depth, he strives to express in intensity. What he lacks in wisdom, he makes up for in cleverness. What he lacks of love, he pursues in power. What he lacks in compassion, he compensates for in sentimentality. What he lacks in nobility, he strives to express in tawdry celebrity. What he lacks of beauty, he seeks in graphic realism or garish sensationalism. What he lacks in wonder and reverence, he strives to express in idolatry. What he lacks of reality, he seeks in the abstract or the surreal. What he lacks of spirituality, he seeks in hallucinatory experiences or in the occult psychology of pseudospiritualism. What he lacks of religion, he pursues in utopias, progressivism, materialism and scientism.”

~Ali Lakhani

"War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means."

~Carl von Clausewitz