"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

“The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.”

~Paul Kingsnorth

"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

“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

"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

“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

"When you erase God, all that's left is revolution, chaos, and false saviors."

~Fr. Seraphim Rose

“Christian Europe has subdued barbarous nations, and changed them from a savage to a civilized condition, from superstition to true worship. It victoriously rolled back the tide of Mohammedan conquest; retained the headship of civilization; stood forth in the front rank as the leader and teacher of all, in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world the gift of true and many-sided liberty; and most wisely founded very numerous institutions for the solace of human suffering. And if we inquire how it was able to bring about so altered a condition of things, the answer is – beyond all question, in large measure, through religion.”

~Pope Leo XIII

“The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline. This simple observation has nothing to do with Kulturpessimismus, and of course it has nothing to do with any sort of optimism either; The darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of man into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and created have assumed such proportions throughout the earth, that such childish categories of pessimism and optimism have long become absurd.”

~Martin Heidegger

“Modern man does not understand how much his "rationalism" (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic "underworld." He has freed himself from "superstition" (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation."

~C.G. Jung

"To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek Him is the greatest adventure; to find Him, the greatest human achievement."

+Saint Augustine

"By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos."

~T.S. Eliot

"Beauty tells us about the eternal verities... A work of art doesn’t invent truth, but it does make it accessible to us in ways that are not normally available because words and images have been tarnished by overuse or neglect. Art fails when it merely tells us what we already know in the ways that we already know it. That is why art is so deeply related to the prophetic dimension and the place where it connects to truth. That prophetic shock, that challenge to complacency, that revelatory reconfiguration of the way things are, gives us a truer picture of the way that the world is... Truth without beauty is fleshless abstraction, a set of propositions. Only beauty can incarnate truth in concrete, believable, human flesh... Beauty without truth becomes a mask that has no relationship to the face behind it. Beauty without truth is a lie."

~Gregory Wolfe

"Beauty tutors our compassion, making us more prone to love and to see the attraction of goodness. Art takes us out of our self-referentiality and invites us to see through the eyes of the other, whether that other is the artist herself or a character in a story. Because beauty endows goodness with mercy, it enables us to see how difficult it is to achieve goodness, how often one good exists in tension with another. Our pursuit of the good is inherently dramatic, and drama is based on conflict. Thus goodness without beauty is moralism, holier than thou... Beauty without goodness is frigid and lifeless. It can be pure virtuosity—form without meaning—but then it fails to touch the heart. We admire the acrobatics but fail to see the point."

~Gregory Wolfe

"The irreligious spirit made the philosophy of materialism dominant. The human soul is immortal, while money can only make your short time here a bit more comfortable. The devil taught us that happiness and success is measured by how wealthy a country or person is. He only exalts the splendors of this world and leaves no place for spirituality. He teaches us to become as selfish and ambitious as possible, and to trample one another. He teaches us to solely focus on the goods of this world which are limited and scarce, and yet can never satisfy us. Instead of trying to cultivate love within us which is infinite, he convinces us to only care about ourselves and our short miserable time on earth. He has convinced us that there's no such thing as soul and afterlife, that our suffering here is meaningless and good deeds have little value. He tries to divide us through hatred and strife, instead of trying to unite us through peace and harmony. He desperately tries to make us forget God, or deny his love and power."