"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

"Beauty tutors our compassion, making us more prone to love and to see the attraction of goodness. Art takes us out of our self-referentiality and invites us to see through the eyes of the other, whether that other is the artist herself or a character in a story. Because beauty endows goodness with mercy, it enables us to see how difficult it is to achieve goodness, how often one good exists in tension with another. Our pursuit of the good is inherently dramatic, and drama is based on conflict. Thus goodness without beauty is moralism, holier than thou... Beauty without goodness is frigid and lifeless. It can be pure virtuosity—form without meaning—but then it fails to touch the heart. We admire the acrobatics but fail to see the point."

~Gregory Wolfe

“Of what avail is any amount of well-being, if at the same time, we steadily render the world more vulgar, uglier, noisier, and drearier and if we lose the moral and spiritual foundations of their existence? Man simply does not live by radio, automobiles, and refrigerators alone, but by the whole unpurchasable world beyond the market and turnover figures, the world of dignity, beauty, poetry, grace, chivalry, love, and friendship, the world of community, variety of life, freedom, and fullness of personality.”

~Wilhelm Röpke

"The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and therefore the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity, and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason."

~Frithjof Schuon

"And one of the truths that grow truer as a man’s experience accumulates is this very old one; that men need a religion primarily to prevent them from worshiping idols… You do not really get an empty space; you only get a new undergrowth of stunted trees when you lay low the cedars of Lebanon. Unless that part of the mind is satisfied by faith it will be satisfied by a fad; those who destroyed a church have only created a sect… The heir of a great religion is a small religion."

~G.K. Chesterton

"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions... Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches, curses, but will receive praise and honors."

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the ‘class struggle’... Autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.”

~Valentin Tomberg

"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."

~J.R.R. Tolkien

"There is only one form of freedom which they tolerate; and that is the sort of sexual freedom which is covered by the legal fiction of divorce... They are trying to break the vow of the knight as they broke the vow of the monk. They recognise the vow as the vital antithesis to servile status, the alternative and therefore the antagonist. Marriage makes a small state within the state, which resists all such regimentation. That bond breaks all other bonds; that law is found stronger than all later and lesser laws. They desire the democracy to be sexually fluid, because the making of small nuclei is like the making of small nations. Like small nations, they are a nuisance to the mind of imperial scope. In short, what they fear, in the most literal sense, is home rule."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth seeking and consuming animal.“

~Richard M. Weaver

“Instead of freedom from sin, people began to strive for freedom to sin. True freedom, freedom of spirit, Christian freedom came to be considered "despotism," "coercion," the oppression of the Church, while the dissipation of one's sinful will, which leads to enslavement of the spirit, was made life's ideal.”

+Archbishop Averky Taushev

“It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.”

~Hilaire Belloc

"We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power."

~Joseph Sobran

"The doctrinal intolerance of the Church has saved the world from chaos. Her doctrinal intolerance has placed beyond question political, domestic, social, and religious, truths—primitive and holy truths, which are not subject to discussion, because they are the foundation of all discussions; truths which cannot be called into doubt for a moment without the understanding on that moment oscillating, lost between truth and error, and the clear mirror of human reason becoming soiled and obscured…"

~Juan Donoso Cortés

"There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state might be a fallen state... For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy that threatens even that minimum consensus of values necessary for a political state."

~Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"The mere omission (let alone contempt) of the great Being in any human endeavour brands it with an irrevocable anathema. Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force... When we reflect on the attested facts of all history, when we understand that in the chain of human institutions, from those that have marked the great turning points in history down to the smallest social organization, from empires down to brotherhoods, all have a divine foundation, and that human power, whenever it isolates itself, can only give its works a false and passing existence..."

~Joseph de Maistre

"The effects of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger things or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life... They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares."

~G.K. Chesterton

“If we imagine a technologically advanced Brave New World in which mankind has forgotten his religious heritage and historical tradition—and therefore has no basis for interpreting his own life in moral terms—that would be the end of mankind. It is most unlikely that mankind, deprived of its historical consciousness and religious tradition because they are technologically useless, would be able to live peacefully, satisfied with his achievements. In fact, I would expect the opposite, since it is in the very constitution of humanity that our wants have no definite limits. They can grow indefinitely in an endless spiral of greed.”

~Leszek Kołakowski

"The right field for the intuitive or indefinable type of truth is in the arts. It will best teach its own type of truth, not by introducing unreason into the operations of reason, or turning the multiplication table upside down, or denying that truth is the opposite of falsehood- but by minding its own business and producing its own masterpieces out of its own workshop. Truth that really cannot be expressed in logic can be expressed in line and color and rhythm and imagery and melody. And those intangible truths express themselves there without mucking up philosophy or morality or the sane process of thinking."

~G.K. Chesterton