"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate... Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself... It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

~Alexis de Tocqueville

“Man must see things according to the spirit of the Creator, not with the superficial, profane and desacralizing view of the vulgar soul. The noble man feels the need to admire, to venerate, to worship; the vile man on the contrary tends to belittle, even to mock, which is the way the devil sees things; but it is also diabolical to admire what is evil, whereas it is normal and praiseworthy to despise evil as such, for the truth has precedence over everything... The definition of man according to immortality has precedence over the definition of man according to earthly life. The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle; the Bible speaks of ‘mockers.’ The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect."

~Frithjof Schuon

"The Christian principles are self-sacrifice, humility, asceticism and the promise of afterlife. The soft Satanism of our age inverts these principles, making egotism, pride, hedonism and a obsession with our success in this world triumphant. Because of liberalism, materialism and overall decadence we can see how our cultural establishment promotes mostly some of the worst people, like millionaires and gangsters; makes them glamorous in appearance while in reality they're all cunning greedy devils. At least in the past, our governments promoted saints, men of culture, both true heroes and heroes of legend, and the common people knew to differentiate a good man from a bad man. Now all that seems to be lost because of the immense propaganda and absence of censorship. This vile culture and the loss of moral sense is perhaps the most dangerous thing of our day."

"We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for & died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born."

~Roger Scruton

"Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

~G.K. Chesterton

"The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform."

~Christopher Dawson

"It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants."

~Alexis de Tocqueville

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

~H.L. Mencken

"The remainder of so-called Christian populations make no distinction between Christian and modern ethics. The ethic of paganism has taken its place on a global scale: namely, what is central to paganism, the worship of dead matter, that is, that life and goodness can come from dead matter, whether it be technology, power or money."

~Matthew Raphael Johnson

"Some of the problems commonly engaging the attention of philosophical thought appear to be deprived, not only of all importance, but of any meaning as well; a host of problems arise resting solely upon some ambiguity or upon a confusion of points of view, problems that only exist in fact because they are badly expressed, and that normally should not arise at all. In most cases therefore, it would in itself be sufficient to set these problems forth correctly in order to cause them to disappear, were it not that philosophy has an interest in keeping them alive, since it thrives largely upon ambiguities."

~René Guénon

"We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place."

~Joseph de Maistre

"The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words — ‘free-love’ — as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants."

~G.K. Chesterton

“One of the leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. Not one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”

~Edmund Burke

"We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art... Industry without art is brutality."

~Ananda Coomaraswamy

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?"

~J.G. Farrell

"The fragments of the past that survive embarrass the modern landscape in which they stand out."

~Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.”

~Roger Scruton

"Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers."

~Leopold Kohr

"Our intelligence seems to have become collectivized along with the necessary collectivization of modern mass states, and lodged itself in the government which is taking charge of managing our lives in an ever-increasing degree. Painful as we may think this is, the mass state leaves us no other choice. The law of crowd living is organization, and other words for organization are militarism, socialism, or communism, whichever we prefer. This condition must by necessity produce a fundamental change in the outlook of the citizen of the mass state. Finding himself perpetually living in the midst of formidable crowds it is only natural that he should begin to see greatness in what to the inhabitant of a small state is a stifling nightmare. He becomes obsessed with a mass complex. He becomes number struck and cheers whenever another million is added to the population figure..."

"...He falls into the error against which Aristotle has warned, and confounds a populous state with a great one. Quantity suddenly turns before his dazzled eyes into quality. Platitudes, pronounced in chorus by the multitudes, turn into hymns. A new, red, bloodshot sun arises out of a fiery dawn -- the community, the people, the nation, humanity, or whatever he may call the monster whose only sign of existence seems its voracious appetite for human sacrifice. Ecstatically he announces that the new thing that has formed itself out of our collective flesh is greater than the sum of us all, though this greater thing is completely illiterate, has never been able to pronounce a single word, has never written a poem or expressed a thought, and has never given anyone a fond pat on the shoulder. It depends on government as its constant interpreter because in its mongoloid development it has not even been able to master its own language..."

~Leopold Kohr

"The solution of the problems confronting the world as a whole does not seem to lie in the creation of still bigger social units and still vaster governments whose formation is now attempted with such unimaginative fanaticism by our statesmen. It seems to lie in the elimination of those overgrown organisms that go by the name of great powers, and in the restoration of a healthy system of small and easily manageable States such as characterized earlier ages... A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power... that is, a small-scale social environment with all its potential for global pluralistic cooperation and largely unaffiliated self-sufficiency, by extending not centralised control but by decontrolling locally centred and nourished communities, each with its own institutional nucleus and a limited but strong and independent gravitational field..."

~Leopold Kohr

"We cannot help noticing that, like all propagandists, the apostles of tolerance, truth to tell, are very often the most intolerant of men. This is what has in fact happened, and it is strangely ironical: those who wished to overthrow all dogma have created for their own use, we will not say a new dogma, but a caricature of dogma, which they have succeeded in imposing on the western world in general; in this way there have been established, under the pretext of "freedom of thought," the most chimerical beliefs that have ever been seen at any time, under the form of these different idols."

~René Guénon

"In an age of 'anything goes', virtue is a revolutionary thing. In an age of rebellion, authority is the radical idea. In an age of pell-mell 'progress' to annihilation, tradition is the hero on the white horse."

~Peter Kreeft

“I am becoming orthodox," I said, "because I have come, rightly or wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes.”

~G.K. Chesterton