"During the antiquity some philosophers taught that evil belongs to the realm of the limitless and good belongs to that which is limited. Aristotle made this truth the foundation of everything: philosophy, ethics, and by consequence, politics and culture."

#Lindbom #love #liberty #order #chaos

"The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words — ‘free-love’ — as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants."

~G.K. Chesterton

“There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, selfdiscipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”

~C.S. Lewis

“God is a consuming fire. He alone can refine us like gold, and separate us from the slag and dross of our selfish individualities to fuse us into this wholeness of perfect unity that will reflect His own Triune Life forever. As long as we do not permit His love to consume us entirely and to unite us in Himself, the gold that is in us will be hidden by the rock and dirt which keep us separate from one another. As long as we are not purified by the love of God and transformed into Him in the union of pure sanctity, we will remain apart from one another, opposed to one another, and union among us will be a precarious and painful thing, full of labor and sorrow and without lasting cohesion.”

~Thomas Merton

“The modern man is no longer a unity, but a confused bundle of complexes and nerves. He is so dissociated, so alienated from himself that he sees himself less as a personality than as a battlefield where a civil war rages between a thousand and one conflicting loyalties. There is no single overall purpose in his life. His soul is comparable to a menagerie in which a number of beasts, each seeking its own prey, turn one upon the other. Or he may be likened to a radio, that is tuned in to several stations; instead of getting any one clearly, it receives only an annoying static.”

~Fulton J. Sheen

#Davila #progress #customs #individual #education #tradition #laws #fashion

“Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

~Flannery O'Connor

"The fragments of the past that survive embarrass the modern landscape in which they stand out."

~Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“One of the leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. Not one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”

~Edmund Burke

“Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.”

~Roger Scruton

"Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers."

~Leopold Kohr

"We cannot help noticing that, like all propagandists, the apostles of tolerance, truth to tell, are very often the most intolerant of men. This is what has in fact happened, and it is strangely ironical: those who wished to overthrow all dogma have created for their own use, we will not say a new dogma, but a caricature of dogma, which they have succeeded in imposing on the western world in general; in this way there have been established, under the pretext of "freedom of thought," the most chimerical beliefs that have ever been seen at any time, under the form of these different idols."

~René Guénon

"In an age of 'anything goes', virtue is a revolutionary thing. In an age of rebellion, authority is the radical idea. In an age of pell-mell 'progress' to annihilation, tradition is the hero on the white horse."

~Peter Kreeft

"Progress is pure illusion. It affects only the sphere of matter, while the spirit is rigorously degraded. What our contemporaries pass off as achievements are in fact shameful vices: the rejection of religion as prejudice, immorality as the overcoming of complexes, contempt for the past as swaggering ignorance, the ephemerality of fashion as the absolutization of vanity. Stupidity is raised to the norm, the development of the media is accompanied by the fact that the information is so small that there is no need to transmit it. Reality slips through our fingers, becomes illusory. Aristocratic ideals are replaced by vile tastes of the crowds, the market and entertainment, social conformity and intellectual anarchy, arrogant stupidity and arrogant insignificance. According to Guénon, the modern world is worthy only of contempt and disgust. And not in some particular aspect, but in its entirety."

~A.G. Dugin

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."

~Mircea Eliade

"The producers and promoters of modern art form a veritable mafia that is made up of an international network of art galleries, museums, universities, critics and auction houses. Governments at the national and provincial levels also support this genre by subsidizing artists and related exhibitions, thus contributing to the distortion and imbalance of the masses. Art should elevate people's feelings, arousing in them appreciation and admiration for the beauty of classical forms and noble deeds. The so-called modern or contemporary art is nothing more than the manifestation of an unbalanced society uprooted from nature by the pretentious and perverse intellectuals of Gramscian formation who control the media and the educational system of our decadent society. So, it is used as a weapon of cultural degradation. The awareness of this is the duty of every good citizen and every lover of beauty and dignity."

~Claudio Lombardo

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance... In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”

~Neil Postman

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it’s pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We’re on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”

~C.S. Lewis

"The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth... It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value..."

~Ananda Coomaraswamy