"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

“The Socialist saw plainly the rights of the Society; the Anarchist saw the rights of the Individual. How therefore were these to be reconciled? The Church stepped in at that crucial point and answered, By the Family—whether domestic or Religious. For in the Family you have both claims recognized: there is authority and yet there is liberty. For the union of the Family lies in Love; and Love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.”

~Robert Hugh Benson

“Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic—she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic—she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic—she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favors. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.”

~C.S. Lewis

"Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom."

~G.K. Chesterton

"There is no profit in studying
doctrines unless the life of one’s
soul is acceptable and conforms
to God’s will. The cause of all
evils is delusion, self-deception
and ignorance of God."

+St. Anthony the Great

“The hero can never be a relativist... The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace.[...] In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.”

~Richard M. Weaver

“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