"A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and microphone of his own age."

~C.S. Lewis

"As enunciated today, “progress” is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress—that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible—at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word “progress” than we."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche;—these are the things about which we are actually fighting most. It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this “progressive” age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most “progressive” people in it."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Meaning is disappearing from our lives. The amount of information being dumped on our heads is increasing exponentially. New technologies make primary sources more and more accessible, but this does not lead to an accumulation of knowledge. Not only has clarity not increased, but on the contrary, we understand the world around us less and less. This happens because the criteria of understanding have been lost, the instance in our consciousness, in our culture, in our society, which give life meaning, interprets reality, puts disparate facts into appropriate boxes, has disappeared. Westerners "killed God" according to Nietzsche, but along with him man himself disappeared as a reasonable, active being, as something vertical, capable of establishing clear guidelines and giving definite sense to the world. All they are left with is a meaningless mosaic of post-modernist culture, where the pathos of humanism has dried up and civilizational fatigue has accumulated, depriving life of meaning."

~A.G. Dugin

"The traditions of humanity support humanity and the central one is this tradition of Marriage. And the essential of it is that a free man and a free woman choose to found on earth the only voluntary state; the only state which creates and which loves its citizens. So long as these real responsible beings stand together, they can survive all the vast changes, deadlocks, and disappointments which make up mere political history."

~G.K. Chesterton

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the “consumer”, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

~Andrei Tarkovsky

"I have nothing positive to say about popular culture, and nothing positive to say about the cultural establishment… We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work. Popular culture contains pockets of gentleness and melody. Architects, writers and composers produce works which are neither kitsch nor ‘kitsch’. Prayer and penitence have been interrupted, but not forgotten. To those who wish for it, the ethical life may still be retrieved. Ours is a catacomb culture, a flame kept alive by undaunted monks. And what the monks of Europe achieved in a former dark age, they might achieve again.”

~Sir Roger Scruton

"By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality and ostentation."

~Fyodor Dostoevsky

“There will come a time when it will be recognized that man does not live on horsepower and tools alone. There are also goods which he does not want to and cannot do without. And he will learn to economize, and he will not seek to win one thing, only to lose everything else with it. For if man had gained everything that could be gained with his technology, he would have come to the realization that life on the now disfigured earth—which has been made so excessively easy and simple—is actually no longer worth living; that we have indeed snatched everything that our planet had to give away, and in the process we have destroyed it, and thus ourselves, in this extractive work. Each one of us has to take care of his own part, so that the change may come before it is everywhere too late forever!”

~Paul Schultze-Naumburg

“Modern civilization finds itself in a difficult position because it does not suit us. It has been erected without any knowledge of our real nature. It was born from the whims of scientific discoveries, from the appetites of men, their illusions, their theories, and their desires. Although constructed by our efforts, it is not adjusted to our size and shape.”

~Alexis Carrel

"There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other external; religious control and political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of external political control falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If civilized man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense."

~Juan Donoso Cortes

“Modem society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.”

~Alasdair MacIntyre

"Everywhere in the modern world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.”

~Jacques Maritain

"The world has gone mad, therefore, we are forced to turn inward. The problem is that, for many, if not most, there is nothing to turn to. There is no inner self, but rather a superficial set of masks that are changed as circumstances dictate. Here, avoiding suffering seems to be the only purpose. It comes at the expense of personhood. This is the "mass man", one incapable of rising above the pleasure-pain nexus. They are already dead."

~Matthew Raphael Johnson

“Liberalism is, on one hand, the regime without faith, the regime that hands over everything, even the essentials of the country’s destiny, to free discussion. For Liberalism, nothing is absolutely true or false. The truth is, in each case, what the greater number of votes say. Thus, it does not matter to Liberalism if a people agrees upon suicide, provided that the proposed suicide is carried out in accordance with electoral practice. And since for the functioning of electoral practice the existence of factions must be encouraged and strife between them must be stimulated, the Liberal system is the system of permanent disunion, permanent want of popular faith in any profound community of destiny.”

~José Antonio Primo de Rivera

"Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is virgin nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope."

~Frithjof Schuon

"Many of us long for the past because we believe, correctly, that the past uniquely offered something that satisfied a core human need—namely, the need for hope for something better and everlasting beyond this life, which communities steeped in religious tradition, in which faith formed the center of one’s life and permeated every aspect of it, were able to inspire. In short, this past provided the means by which man’s spiritual thirst could be quenched. The tragedy of the present condition consists not only in the fact that we are dying of this thirst, but also of our ignorance of the reason for—or even the fact of—our condition, as well as the truth that the cure lies within our own hearts, buried though it is beneath layers of selfish and worldly attachments."

~Dr. Amir Azarvan

“Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is no longer any discernible meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation State, to a State which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices.”

~Alain de Benoist

"We have the material conditions for world unity, but there is as yet no common moral order without which a true culture cannot exist. The entire modern world wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, and watches the same films, but it does not possess common ethical values or a sense of spiritual community or common religious beliefs. We have a long way ot go before such a spiritual community is conceivable, and meanwhile what we call modern civilization remains an area of conflict - a chaos of conflicting ideologies, institutions, and moral standards.[...] Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces."

~Christopher Dawson