"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

"It must be recognised that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator.”

~Nikolai Berdyaev

"The threatening clouds of God’s wrath were over us. The Lord has come—the peacemaker, and has dispersed that cloud. We were covered with wounds of sins and passions; the healer of souls and bodies has come and healed us. We were bound by the fetters of slavery; the liberator has come and released our fetters. The work that the Lord Who is born has wrought touches every one of us. Those who enter into communion with Him receive from Him freedom, healing, and peace; they possess all of this and taste of its sweetness."

+Saint Theophan the Recluse

“Man as he came from the hand of his Maker was poetic in both mind and body, but the gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.”

~John Muir

"Against this panorama of nations, morals, and religions rising and falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Is it only the vain and traditional boast of each "modern" generation? Since we have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends - the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is power"! Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed art and mythology rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes."

~Will Durant

“The study of the past is an exercise in humility; while the smug are nervously trammeled up in their self-opinion, the humble are free to rejoice in what is genuinely great or noble or beautiful. The adulator of the new must believe that a great oblong in brick and glass and steel marks an ‘advance’ in every respect from Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, but the humble student of history has no stake in that game. He is free to wonder at the glory that a supposedly benighted people could accomplish—and then free to wonder where the real artistic darkness is to be found, then or now.”

~Anthony Esolen

"Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world."

~Jacques Ellul