“In all of Europe, in the whole world, political power is at the service of high finance and banking, it submits to the abject impositions of thieves and fraudsters working together in legal consortium. Not even in the worst times of barbarism and slave trade were human beings trafficked with such cold cruelty. Nations are put on the market. Public life exists only as a filthy commerce practiced within the confines of sterile institutions and hollow laws.”

~Gabriele D’Annunzio

“A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the ‘class struggle’... Autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.”

~Valentin Tomberg

"And one of the truths that grow truer as a man’s experience accumulates is this very old one; that men need a religion primarily to prevent them from worshiping idols… You do not really get an empty space; you only get a new undergrowth of stunted trees when you lay low the cedars of Lebanon. Unless that part of the mind is satisfied by faith it will be satisfied by a fad; those who destroyed a church have only created a sect… The heir of a great religion is a small religion."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Globalization is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become–is visibly becoming–a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money."

~Peter Hitchens

“Instead of freedom from sin, people began to strive for freedom to sin. True freedom, freedom of spirit, Christian freedom came to be considered "despotism," "coercion," the oppression of the Church, while the dissipation of one's sinful will, which leads to enslavement of the spirit, was made life's ideal.”

+Archbishop Averky Taushev

"There is only one form of freedom which they tolerate; and that is the sort of sexual freedom which is covered by the legal fiction of divorce... They are trying to break the vow of the knight as they broke the vow of the monk. They recognise the vow as the vital antithesis to servile status, the alternative and therefore the antagonist. Marriage makes a small state within the state, which resists all such regimentation. That bond breaks all other bonds; that law is found stronger than all later and lesser laws. They desire the democracy to be sexually fluid, because the making of small nuclei is like the making of small nations. Like small nations, they are a nuisance to the mind of imperial scope. In short, what they fear, in the most literal sense, is home rule."

~G.K. Chesterton

"We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power."

~Joseph Sobran

"The mere omission (let alone contempt) of the great Being in any human endeavour brands it with an irrevocable anathema. Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force... When we reflect on the attested facts of all history, when we understand that in the chain of human institutions, from those that have marked the great turning points in history down to the smallest social organization, from empires down to brotherhoods, all have a divine foundation, and that human power, whenever it isolates itself, can only give its works a false and passing existence..."

~Joseph de Maistre

"If the western Middle Ages was dominated by the approach to realism that is Thomism, then the transition of modern times in the era of Protestant reformation has become increasingly dominated by nominsalism. It is the idea of the new man. Nominalism best describes a spirit of modernity, because nominalism is based on the conviction that there are no sacred realities. It rests on the assumption that all that exists is a world of material things and the human mind constructs ideas and concepts on the basis solely of observation. For the more efficient means to manipulate nature, rationalism began to abstract, giving names to things that are arbitrary vocal equivalents. The sacred intuition of being in the world, the penetration into its sacred dimension, into the experience of divine presence is discarded, as the empiricist falsifies the picture of the observed world. The empirical nominalist approach created a radical desacralization of the world."

~A.G. Dugin

“We are the last. Almost the ones after the last. Immediately after us begins the world we call, which we have called, which we shall not cease calling, the modern world. The world that tries to be clever. The world of the intelligent, of the advanced, of those who know, who don't have to be shown a thing twice, who have nothing more to learn. That is to say: the world of those who believe in nothing.”

~Charles Peguy, 1910

"Parliament today means Plutocracy. The beastly condition of Parliament is a byword. The atmosphere of bribery and blackmail – it is rather a stench than an atmosphere – is the very air of what is called ‘Politics.’ Until you have got rid of that you can do nothing. So long as the legislative machine is controlled by and composed of the monopolists, all effort at restoring healthy economic life will fail.”

~Hilaire Belloc

“Hostile toward every institution which acts as a check upon its absolute power, the State has been engaged, ever since the decline of the medieval order, in stripping away one by one the functions and prerogatives of those ancient institutions which were the guardians of true community: aristocracy, church, guild, family, and local association. What the state seeks is a tableland upon which a multitude of individuals, solitary though herded together, labor anonymously for the State’s maintenance. Universal military conscription and the ‘mobile labor force’ and the concentration-camp are only the more recent developments of the system.”

~Russell Kirk

"All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. "

~Victor Hugo

“If we imagine a technologically advanced Brave New World in which mankind has forgotten his religious heritage and historical tradition—and therefore has no basis for interpreting his own life in moral terms—that would be the end of mankind. It is most unlikely that mankind, deprived of its historical consciousness and religious tradition because they are technologically useless, would be able to live peacefully, satisfied with his achievements. In fact, I would expect the opposite, since it is in the very constitution of humanity that our wants have no definite limits. They can grow indefinitely in an endless spiral of greed.”

~Leszek Kołakowski

"I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine."

~G.K. Chesterton

“As Orwell so succinctly put it, ‘The farther a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.' Man has drifted far, indeed. There is simply no place for the hard, objective truth in this world, and for those who insist upon speaking it regardless, little—if any—grace is afforded. In man’s abundance of sinful pride, he has come to believe himself to be infallible in thought and deed. To be proven wrong is to therefore be proven imperfect, thus contradicting his perceived infallibility. For this reason, every topic on the table of public discourse seems to lead not to rational, intentional, and thoughtful discourse, but rather to virulent, vitriolic, and hostile aggression. We walk on eggshells in our Lord of the Flies society, lest we step out of line and end up with our heads on pikes.”

~Jeremy Kee

"The big, blazing, terrible truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles."

~Peter Kreeft

“There is no fulfillment of man’s true vocation in the order of nature. Man was made for more truth than he can see with his own unaided intelligence, and for more love than his will alone can achieve and for a higher moral activity than human prudence ever planned.”

~Thomas Merton

“The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens this social contract in which each supposedly limits his or her freedom in order to live in peace with others. Such universalism of interest is another aspect of modern illusion. There is no such thing as scientifically based human solidarity. I can convince myself that it is in my interest not to rob other people, not to rape and murder, because I can convince myself that the risk is too great. This is the Hobbesian model of solidarity: greed moderated by fear. But social chaos stands in the shadows of such moral anarchy. When society adheres to moral norms for no other reason than prudence, it is extremely weak and its fabric tears at the slightest crisis. In such a society, there is no basis for personal responsibility, charity or compassion. We need instruments of human solidarity that are not based on our own instincts, self-interest or on force. The communist attempt to institutionalize solidarity ended in disaster.”

~Leszek Kołakowski

"A people which places commerce in the rank of social institutions, which sees a duty in it rather than a need, which, by every means possible, gives it an unlimited extension, instead of enclosing it within the bounds of the indispensably necessary, may dazzle by the brilliance of its enterprises and the magnitude of its successes; but its physical prosperity conceals degraded souls and abject morals: it is a wholly material people.”

~Louis de Bonald