"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

“The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness - even though all the proofs in history have shown that only lack and attempt cause a life worth living, that the material prosperity doesn't bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks.”

~Pentti Linkola

“For a long time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.”

~T.S. Eliot

"Individuals are merely raw material for persons. Persons are born by sustained loving in relationships marked by ritual/repetition; in marriage by weddings, birthdays, baptisms, anniversaries etc. or with God... The man outside of love is a bundle of dissolutions and instincts."

~Jonathan McCormack

"We find ourselves in a world of ruins—we should not forget this. And just how much may still be saved depends only on the existence or lack of men who are still capable of standing among these ruins, not in order to dictate any formulas, but to serve as examplars; not by pandering to demagogy and the materialism of the masses, but in such a way as to reawaken different forms of sensibility and interest.”

~Julius Evola

“Now... at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal. Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis. Most portentous of all, there appear diverging bases of value, so that our single planetary globe is mocked by worlds of different understanding. These signs of disintegration arouse fear, and fear leads to desperate unilateral efforts toward survival, which only forward the process...”

~Richard M. Weaver

"Our progress in science and technique has involved some tincture of evil with good. Our comforts and conveniences may have weakened our physical stamina and our moral fiber. We have immensely developed our means of locomotion, but some of us use them to facilitate crime... We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour as when we had legs. We applaud the cures and incisions of modern medicine if they bring no side effects worse than the malady; we appreciate the assiduity of our physicians in their mad race with the resilience of microbes and the inventiveness of disease; we are grateful for the added years that medical science gives us if they are not a burden–some prolongation of disability. We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village."

~Will Durant

"The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why."

"There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace."

~G.K. Chesterton

"The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the Earth - the very thing the whole story has been about."

~C.S. Lewis

"See the Creator of man made man in order that he who governs the world of the stars might suck milk, that bread might be hungry, that the fount might be thirsty, that light might go to sleep, that the way might be tired by the trip, that Truth might be accused by false witnesses, and that the judge of the living and the dead might be examined by a temporal judge and that justice might be condemned by the unjust. That discipline might be lashed by a whip, that the bunch of grapes might be crowned with thorns, that the foundation stone might be hung on a tree, that virtue might become weak, health wounded, and life itself might die."

+Saint Augustine