"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

“If the general public accepts the pretext of ‘civilization' in all good faith, there are some for whom it amounts to no more than mere economic hypocrisy, a cloak for their designs of conquest and economic civilization; but what strange times indeed, when so many men allow themselves to be persuaded that they are making a people happy by reducing them to subjection, by robbing them of what is most precious in their eyes, namely their own civilization, by compelling them to adopt customs and institutions which were intended for another race, and by coercing them into assuming the most distasteful occupations in order that they may perforce come to acquire things for which they have not the slightest use! That however is the position today: the modern West cannot tolerate the idea that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as quantity alone counts, and as everything that eludes the grasp of the senses is held moreover to be non-existent."

~René Guénon

“The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.“

~Robert Nisbet

“As between individuals, without a common idea there can be no true unity between peoples, and this common idea must be placed as highly as possible so that it can be seen from far around. By putting it too low, under the pretense of making it more accessible, it degrades the best, and only acknowledges the mediocre in their mediocrity. A high idea does not need to be understood by every citizen in order to be taken part of; it is enough for it to be in the air as it acts both directly and indirectly on our consciences.”

~Georges Bernanos

“It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?”

~Thomas Merton

“When the family shall no longer have a head, and the great foundation for the subordination of children in the mother's example is gone; when the mother shall have found another sphere than her home for her energies; when she shall have exchanged the sweet charities of domestic love and sympathy for the fierce passions of the hustings; when families shall be disrupted at the caprice of either party, and the children scattered as foundlings from their hearthstone, — it requires no wisdom to see that a race of sons will be reared nearer akin to devils than to men. In the hands of such a bastard progeny, without discipline, without homes, without a God, the last remains of social order will speedily perish, and society will be overwhelmed in savage anarchy.”

~R.L. Dabney

“Ideological ugliness in the name of egalitarianism continues to do damage, with the paradoxical result that it increases inequality: for as it destroys beauty and elegance, so beauty and elegance become ever more rarefied and available to a smaller and smaller elite, and this is so even where income and consumption increase. The standard of living rises while the quality of life falls.”

~Theodore Dalrymple

“According to materialism, men are like little flies in hot weather. They crowd one another in a vast swarm, push one another, fly around in confusion, mate, feed and warm themselves, and then disappear in a disordered process, only to give space to tomorrow’s swarm of exactly the same kind.”

~Father I. Vino­gradov

“Since the fall, not merely of the hierarchic nature of society, but of almost all traditional forms, the consciously conservative man stands as it were in a vacuum. He stands alone in a world which, in its all opaque enslavement, boasts of being free, and, in all its crushing uniformity, boasts of being rich. It is screamed in his ears that humanity is continually developing upwards, that human nature, after developing for so and so many millions of years, has now undergone a decisive mutation, which will lead to its final victory over matter. The consciously conservative man stands alone amongst manifest drunks, is alone awake amongst sleep-walkers who take their dream for reality. From understanding and experience he knows that man, with all his passion for novelty, has remained fundamentally the same, for good or ill; the fundamental questions in human life have always remained the same; the answers to them have always been known..."

~Titus Burckhardt