“We have everything upside down. Where we should be idealists- our moral, economic, and religious lives, we are pragmatic realists. Where we should be realists- our political life, we are instead intransigent idealists.”

~E.H. Looney

"No traditional civilization has ever seen such large masses condemned to obscure, soulless, automatic labor, to slavery which does not even have as its counterpart the high stature and the tangible reality of figures of lords and rulers, but is found imposed in a seemingly innocuous way by the tyranny of the economic factor and the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And the fact that the modern vision of life, in its materialism, has deprived the individual of any possibility of introducing into his destiny an element of transfiguration, of seeing in it a sign and a symbol, the slavery of today is the most gloomy and the most desperate of all that we have ever known."

~Julius Evola

“A people consists of a complex of relationships and attitudes, and as such, there is another, far greater threat to it than physical destruction or loss of independence, it is that of dissolution. If men no longer feel as members of the same body, if the climate of trust that unites them disappears, if the symbols they have in common no longer have the same meaning for them... if the moral life of the people disappears. This loss of a moral existence is not due to sudden external causes, but to internal phenomena and dissociators: byproducts of progress.”

~Bertrand de Jouvenel

“Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”

~Thomas Merton

“All forms of governments destroy themselves by carrying their basic principles to excess. Democracies become too free in politics, in economics, in morals - even in literature and art, until at last even the dogs in our homes rise up on their hind legs and demand their rights. Disorder grows to such a point that society will then abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.”

~Will Durant

"That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed, and hatred—this even its contemporaries could see all too well. They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be a crime. But the twentieth century has done especially much to tarnish the romantic luster of revolution which still prevailed in the eighteenth century. As half-centuries and centuries have passed, people have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people."

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"All great art is praise; the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own."

~John Ruskin

"Hate what the world seeks, and seek what it avoids."

+St. Ignatius of Loyola

"Those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. Celestial and divine beings have clearer judgements, an uncorrupted will, and the ability to achieve what they seek. Human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood. Their ultimate enslavement is when they give themselves up to vice and no longer exercise their powers of reason. They have lowered their eyes from the highest truth to dark, base things and are wrapped in a cloud of ignorance. They give in to destructive whims and consent to things that strengthen their bonds of slavery. They have brought this upon themselves and are captives of the exercise of their innate freedom. But still, providence looks after them from eternity, sees what they do, and disposes rewards and punishments according to what each person deserves.”

~Boethius

“None of the dogmas of modern science are immutable. Gigantic factories, office buildings rising to the sky, inhuman cities, industrial morals, faith in mass production, are not indispensable to civilization. Other modes of existence and of thought are possible. Culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without enslaving factories, science without the worship of matter, would restore to man his intelligence, his moral sense, his virility, and lead him to the summit of his development.”

~Alexis Carrel

"Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

"By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books."

~Juvenal

“There is no chain of philosophical reasoning or method of philosophical enquiry through which we can arrive at the truths of faith as conclusions. But once by faith we have acknowledged those truths we are able to understand why there is good reason to acknowledge them. This...is because of the effects of sin on the human mind. It is because human minds are obscured by familiarity with darkness, which covers them in a night of sins and bad habits, and are unable to perceive with the clarity and purity proper to reason that authority has been provided to bring the faltering eye into the light of truth."

~Alasdair MacIntyre

"Our potlatch is one of baseness, shamelessness, obscenity, debasement and abjection. This is the whole movement of our culture - it is here that we raise the stakes. Our truth is always to be sought in unveiling, desublimation, reductive analysis -- it is the truth of the repressed, of exhibition, of confession, of laying bare. Nothing is true if it is not de-sacralized, objectivized, shorn of its aura, dragged on to the stage. Our potlatch is the potlatch of indifference -- an in-differentiation of values, but also an indifference to ourselves. If we cannot lay our own lives on the line, this is because we are already dead. And it is this indifference and abjection that we throw out to the others as a challenge: the challenge to debase themselves in their turn, to deny their own values, to lay themselves bare, to make their confessions, to own up -- in short, to respond with a nihilism equal to our own."

~Jean Baudrillard

"Humanity had thought itself sufficient, and even now we think we can escape our destiny by our own efforts. Escape!--that is our only thought. To escape from the insanity, the hell of modern life is all we wish. But we cannot escape!!! We must go through this hell, and accept it, knowing it is the love of God that causes our suffering. What terrible anguish!--to suffer so, not knowing why, indeed thinking there is no reason. The reason is God's love--do we see it blazing in the darkness?--we are blind."

–Fr. Seraphim Rose

“If we accept the principle of social planning from the bottom upwards without regard for spiritual values we are left with a machine-made culture which differs from one country to another only in so far as the process of mechanization is more or less perfected. To most people this is rather an appalling prospect, for the ordinary man does not regard the rationalization of life as the only good. On the contrary, men are often more attracted by the variety of life than by its rationality. Even if it were possible to solve all the material problems of life: poverty, unemployment and war and to construct a uniform scientifically-organized world order, neither the strongest nor the highest elements in human nature would find satisfaction in it.”

~Christopher Dawson

“When authority comes from the people it is vacillating; when it comes from God it is steadfast. It is either beyond all question, or it is no authority at all. Such is the lesson of history.”

~Honoré de Balzac

"If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in religion, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of atoms... I cannot understand how the thought of minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in trees "

~C.S. Lewis

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

~Edmund Burke

“All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief. But neither can religion subsist if severed from a healthy culture; no cultured person should remain indifferent to erosion of apprehension of the transcendent.”

~Russell Kirk

"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom... it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."

~Aldous Huxley