“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

“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