"The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o’-the-wisp."

~Mario Vargas Llosa

“As the astronauts soar into the vast eternities of space, on earth the garbage piles higher; as the groves of academe extend their domain, their alumni’s arms reach lower; as the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence. In great wealth, great poverty; in health, sickness; in numbers, deception. Gorging, left hungry; sedated, left restless; telling all, hiding all; in flesh united, forever separate. So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely.”

~Malcolm Muggeridge

"A people which places commerce in the rank of social institutions, which sees a duty in it rather than a need, which, by every means possible, gives it an unlimited extension, instead of enclosing it within the bounds of the indispensably necessary, may dazzle by the brilliance of its enterprises and the magnitude of its successes; but its physical prosperity conceals degraded souls and abject morals: it is a wholly material people.”

~Louis de Bonald

“We ask God to free us from ‘God’
in so far as we conceive of God.”

~Meister Eckhart

“Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected. Men cannot live happily alone and without values or any sense of identity: such a situation leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality and worse. With the spread of purely egotistic goals at the expense of the altruistic regard for family and nation, the individual begins to talk of his rights rather than his duties, for he no longer feels any sense of destiny, of belonging to and being a part of a greater and more enduring entity. He no longer rejoices in the secure belief that he shares in a heritage which it is part of his common duty to protect—he no longer feels that he has anything in common with those around him. In short, he feels lonely and oppressed. Since all values have become strictly personal, everything is now equal to everything; e.g. nothing equals nothing.”

~Alain de Benoist

"If we become stiffnecked in our afflictions and do not confess that we are the cause of these and are worthy to suffer things even greater; if instead we blame other men, sometimes the demons, sometimes even God’s justice; if we maintain that we are innocent of such deeds; and if we continue to think and say this without comprehending that God knows and understands more than we, that “in all the earth are His judgments,” and that a man is not chastened unless He gives His command: then everything that comes upon us will cause us constant sorrow, our tribulations will become very vehement, and we shall be handed over from one to another as in a chain."

+St. Isaac the Syrian

"Evil always takes advantage of ambiguity."

~G.K. Chesterton

“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”

~Malcolm Muggeridge

“There is an essential bond between human freedom and truth, so that freedom which refused to be bound to the truth would fall into arbitrariness and end up submitting itself to the vilest of passions, to the point of self-destruction.”

~Pope Leo XIII

“Europe's rise is written in the terms of Christianity and Monarchy; Europe's decay in the terms of Republicanism, Progressivism, and Godlessness."

~Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

“The condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.”

~Boethius

"Beauty awakens the soul to act."

~Dante Alighieri

“Men's hearts are failing them for fear, not knowing any longer where to rest. We look this way and that way, and catch at one another like drowning men. Go where you will, you find the same phenomena. Science grows, and observers are adding daily to our knowledge of the nature and structure of the material universe, but they tell us nothing, and can tell us nothing, of what we most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is. We had a belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely on the unknown ocean; but the philosophers and critics have been boring holes in the timbers to examine the texture of the wood, and now it leaks at every one of them. We have to help ourselves in the best way that we can.”

~James Anthony Froude

"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds'."

“Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior... All of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

~Guy Debord, 1967

“You must know, friend, that neither an atheist ideology, nor the materialist order, no matter how authoritatively it might be imposed upon you, is capable of raising up an absolutely impregnable wall between you and the spiritual world. The soul cannot be made prisoner. This is a law which the materialists refuse to recognize at their own peril. On the spiritual level there is no captivity without hope.”

-Fr. George Calciu

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid."

~Livy

"Culture, in the traditional sense of the word, is about to disappear... The trivialization of arts and literature, the triumph of the scandalous media and the frivolity of politics are symptoms of a much greater evil that harms today's society: the sacralization of entertainment as the supreme value and ultimate goal of our existence. If in the past culture was a compass, a guide and a kind of consciousness that prevents us from turning our backs on reality, today, in the age of false idols and post-culture, the primacy of the show and superficiality has become the rule that makes any moral, intellectual, and political consciousness fall asleep, blinded and annihilated together with our freedom."

~Mario Vargas Llosa

“The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Our salvation had its origin not from man or from earth, but from the greatest heights of the divine invisible world. So great is God's mercy, and so great is the dignity of man, that the Son of God Himself came down from eternity into time, from heaven to earth, from the throne of glory to the shepherd's cave, solely to save mankind, to cleanse men from sin and to return them to Paradise. I came forth from the Father, where I had everything, and am come into the world, which cannot give Me anything. The Lord was born in a cave to show that the whole world is one dark cave, which He alone can illumine. The Lord was born in Bethlehem--and Bethlehem means "the House of Bread''--to show that He is the only Bread of Life worthy of true men."

+Saint Nikolai Velimirovic

"The temporal can not be separated in man from the spiritual: either they are both harmonized in a fertile unity, the source of equilibrium and peace, or else, if they turn their backs on each other, sooner or later there will come a time when man will be a kind of disjointed puppet who lives in surroundings entirely given over to general subversion, which in fact is the case in our present world."

~Jean Hani