"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."

~Plato

"The pervasive, almost ubiquitous acceptance of various kinds of emotivism and subjectivism in modern Western culture means there can be no *persuasion*--that is to say, no rational argument leading to a freely adopted change of mind. Rather, as belief in objective value evaporates and the public square is evaporated of practical reason, what passes for moral discourse increasingly resembles a war zone in which political propagandists, commercial interests, private whims, and animal instincts fight tooth and nail in a permanent free-for-all."

~Michael Ward

“Science alone is untrue because it aims exclusively at truth—divorced from the good and the beautiful. The scientific mind is far too simple. There are too many facts in too mysterious a relationship for his simple mind—logical analytical as it is—to grasp. In theory he is right; in practice he can never get all the facts as long as he specializes exclusively in the nature of discursive reason. For knowledge—as distinct from wisdom and plastic form—of its very nature excludes all facts.”

~Carl Schmitt

In most Ages, the normal path to improving one’s financial standing was the same as the path of personal improvement. In anomalous Ages [such as ours], when money is itself all that matters, fortune is made through moral relaxation, lack of consciousness, participation in frauds and scams, and businesses which scandalise all those with an inkling of Traditional Values

— Dr. Manuel Leal Freire, Cartas Políticas

"The decline of moral habit produces, in its first stage, a rigid and exalted moralism; and in its second, an immoralism raised to the level of doctrine; sooner or later, it invariably gives birth to the lowest level of immorality.”

~Gustave Thibon

"If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take for certain the opposite of what the liar tells us. But the reverse of truth has a thousand shapes and a boundless field."

~Montaigne

"The power of the Good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful."

~Plato

"The truth is that any advance in science leaves morality in its ancient balance; and it depends still on the inscrutable soul of man whether any discovery is mainly a benefit or mainly of calamity. This is, perhaps, the strongest argument for a morality superior to materialism, and a religion that refuses to be bullied by science. Moral progress must still be made morally; and a modern scientist, who has invented the most complex mechanism, or liberated the most subtle gas, has still exactly the same spiritual problem before him as that which confronted Cain, when he stood with a ragged stone in his hand."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes."

~Peter Kreeft

“It is extremely improbable that we have suddenly become better and smarter than our predecessors. In fact, what has happened is that we have lost the ability to understand functional social patterns other than markets and bureaucracies. The result is that the past appears irrational, our society is plagued by dysfunctions we cannot understand or deal with, and we treat our own blindness and stupidity as the triumph of virtue and enlightenment.”

~James Kalb

"The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique."

~G.K. Chesterton

“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilisation are the only people by whom civilisation is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.”

~C.S. Lewis

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

~Cicero

"Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot the passers-by sneer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Savior on the cross. It is bound hand and foot, all who are in Christ trample it as they pass and as witnesses to Him deride it, scoffing and saying, "O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?"

+Saint Athanasius

"And those of us who have seen all the normal rules and relations of humanity uprooted by random speculators, as if they were, abnormal abuses and almost accidents, will understand why men have sought for something divine if they wished to preserve anything human. They will know why common sense, cast out from some academy of fads and fashions conducted on the lines of a luxurious madhouse, has age after age sought refuge in the high sanity of a sacrament."

~G.K. Chesterton

"We are witnessing, not the natural end of a great human civilization, but the birth of a inhuman civilization that could never have come into being without a vast, an immense, a universal sterilisation of life's highest values."

~George Bernanos

"Beauty tells us about the eternal verities... A work of art doesn’t invent truth, but it does make it accessible to us in ways that are not normally available because words and images have been tarnished by overuse or neglect. Art fails when it merely tells us what we already know in the ways that we already know it. That is why art is so deeply related to the prophetic dimension and the place where it connects to truth. That prophetic shock, that challenge to complacency, that revelatory reconfiguration of the way things are, gives us a truer picture of the way that the world is... Truth without beauty is fleshless abstraction, a set of propositions. Only beauty can incarnate truth in concrete, believable, human flesh... Beauty without truth becomes a mask that has no relationship to the face behind it. Beauty without truth is a lie."

~Gregory Wolfe