“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

"A word that rose to honor at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarized in advance the whole program of modern civilization is 'humanism'. Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence... Humanism was form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy."

~René Guénon

“While traditional man roots meaning in transcendence, the worldly man perceives meaning in predominantly materialistic ways. He compensates for his lack of verticality by an excessive horizontality. Lacking quality, he searches for meaning in predominantly quantitative terms. What he lacks in depth, he strives to express in intensity. What he lacks in wisdom, he makes up for in cleverness. What he lacks of love, he pursues in power. What he lacks in compassion, he compensates for in sentimentality. What he lacks in nobility, he strives to express in tawdry celebrity. What he lacks of beauty, he seeks in graphic realism or garish sensationalism. What he lacks in wonder and reverence, he strives to express in idolatry. What he lacks of reality, he seeks in the abstract or the surreal. What he lacks of spirituality, he seeks in hallucinatory experiences or in the occult psychology of pseudospiritualism. What he lacks of religion, he pursues in utopias, progressivism, materialism and scientism.”

~Ali Lakhani

“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

"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape... The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."

~G.K. Chesterton, 1905

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."

~Gustave Le Bon

“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

"The palace of Herod lies in ruins, but the cave of the Child of Bethlehem remains. The crowns of the caesars have been lost, but the bones of the martyrs have been preserved. The palaces of the pagan kings have been transformed into piles of stone and dust, but the caves of the ascetics have grown into most beautiful churches. The golden idols have been scattered into nothing, but the chains of the Apostle Peter are preserved as a holy relic. The powerful Roman Empire is now only a tale of the dead, while the hut of Christianity, the Holy Church, is today the most powerful realm in the world. Where are the Jews, the murderers of God? They are dispersed throughout the world. Where are the powerful Romans? In the grave. Where is the power of bloody Nero? Where is the power of the evil Diocletian and the depraved Maximian? Where is the success of Julian the Apostate? Where are those high towers? They are where the tower of Babel is--beneath dust and ashes, beneath shame and damnation."

+St. Nikolai Velimirovic

“There have always been some forms of religion in the world and wicked men who opposed them... Never before has there been a sacrilegious conspiracy of every human talent against its Creator... Men of this age have prostituted genius to irreligion and, according to the admirable phrase of Saint Louis on his deathbed, 'They have waged war against God with His own gifts.'"

~Joseph de Maistre

"The regime of diversions, surrogates, and tranquilizers that pass for today's 'distractions' and 'amusements' does not yet allow the modern woman to foresee the crisis that awaits her when she recognizes how meaningless are those male occupations for which she has fought, when the illusions and the euphoria of her conquests vanish, and when she realizes that, given the climate of dissolution, family and children can no longer give her a sense of satisfaction in life."

~Julius Evola

"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

“Democracy is not a fact. It is an idea. This idea inspires laws. And these laws and their institutions reveal themselves to be more and more disastrous, destructive and ruinous, more hostile to the natural tendencies of manners, the spontaneous interplay of interests, and the development of progress. Why? Because the democratic idea is false, as it is in disagreement with nature. Because the democratic idea is bad, in that it constantly subjects the best to the worst, the superior to the inferior.”

~Charles Maurras

"Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history."

~Roger Scruton

"The need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed is matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another. It is a dispersion in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle; in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders in which this can still be exercised... These are the inevitable results of an ever more pronounced materialization, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realized by consciousness of universal principles."

~René Guénon

"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

“In fact, all that deserves to be said - and by that I mean all the words capable of nourishing the inner silence of man and of directing him towards the untranslatable mystery of his origin and of his end - has been proclaimed and repeated a thousand times over the centuries before us.”

~Gustave Thibon

“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent-be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”

~Ernst Jünger

“The family is essentially a protective force, and not least against the claims of the state. It is an area of private custom, as opposed to public law. It is an alternative to the state as a focus of loyalty, and thus a humanizing force in society. Unlike the state, it upholds non-material values, makes them paramount, indeed. It repudiates the exclusive claims of realpolitik. The family, in fact, is a gentle ideology in itself, because it is inconcievable without a system of morality based on altruism. The family embraces tradition rather than fashionable dogma. It upholds a balance of rights and responsibilities, and not merely within generations: it insists on respect for the past, and concern for the future.”

~Paul Johnson

"Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children."

~G.K. Chesterton