“The wise discovered in their hearts
The bond of Being to Non-being.
Whence is this creation?
Is it founded or not?
The presiding Deity in the skies knows it,
Or perhaps He does not.”
- Nasadiya Hymn Rigveda
“He sang Origins in depth and spells in order
how by their Creator’s leave
at the Almighty’s command
of itself the sky was born
from the sky water parted
from the water land stretched forth
on the land all growing things;
he sang of the moon’s shaping
the sun’s placing, the fixing of the sky’s pillars
heaven being filled with stars.”
- The Kalevala 17:541
“The Portal of God is nonexistence. All things sprang from nonexistence. Existence could not make existence existence. It must have proceeded from nonexistence, and nonexistence and nothing are one. Herein is the abiding place of the sage.” - Chuang Tzu
“A slave is he who cannot speak his thought.” - Euripides
“The form of government, when it has been prudently established, produces citizens distinguished for bravery, justice, and every other good quality; whereas, on the other hand, bad institutions render men cowardly, rapacious, and slaves of every foul desire.” - Dionysius of Halicarnassus
“For love of money is the disease which renders us most pitiful and grovelling, and love of pleasure is that which renders us most despicable.” - Longinus
“When Anacharsis heard what Solon was doing, he laughed at the folly of thinking that he could restrain the unjust proceedings and avarice of his citizens by written laws, which, he said, resembled in every way spiders’ webs, and would, like them, catch and hold only the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful would easily break through them.” - Plutarch
“Nor ought we ever to allow any growing power to acquire such a degree of strength as to be able to tear from us, without resistance, our natural, undisputed rights.” - Polybius
“No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.” - Cicero
“No barriers, no masses of matter, however enormous, can withstand the powers of the mind; the remotest corners yield to them; all things succumb, the very heaven itself is laid open.” - Manilius
“I am disgusted with power.” - Messala Corvinus
“As far as the stars are from the earth, and as different as fire is from water, so much do self-interest and integrity differ.” - Lucan
“To wish for death is a coward’s part.” - Ovid
“How utter, utter is the dearth of men who venture down into their own breasts, and how universally they stare at the wallet on the back of the man before them.” - Virgil
“But life is a warfare.” - Seneca
“We become wiser by adversity, prosperity destroys the idea of what is right.” - Seneca
“To be able to endure odium, is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.” - Seneca
“In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.” - Tacitus
“When the state is most corrupt, the laws are most numerous.” - Tacitus
“The wicked find it easier to coalesce for seditious purposes than for concord in peace.” - Tacitus
“To rob, to ravage, and to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.” - Tacitus
“In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness.” - Tacitus
“A small state increases by concord; the greatest falls gradually to ruin by dissension.” - Sallust
“Envy, like flames, soars upwards.” - Livy
“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” - I John 5:7-8
“The torrents of Belial overflowed their high banks.
Like a devouring fire
It destroyed every green or withered tree in its channel.
It wanders about with burning flames
Until all who drink are no more.
It pours over horizons of dry land,
Captures the foundations of mountains with fire.
The roots of flint become streams of pitch,
And it even plunges into the great abyss.
The torrents of Belial burst into Hell itself
And roar with eruptions of mud.
The earth groans in anguish
For the havoc in the universe.
The deeps howl. The living scream,
Go mad, and perish.” - Psalm 8 of the Thanksgiving Psalms (Dead Sea Scrolls)
“As the center of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by his unique, simple, and single cause and power that the principles of being become disjoined at the periphery but rather he circumscribes their extension in a circle and brings back to himself the distinctive elements of beings which he himself brought into existence. The purpose of this is so that the creations and products of the one God be in no way strangers and enemies to one another by having no reason or center for which they might show each other any friendly or peaceful sentiment or identity, and not run the risk of having their being separated from God to dissolve into non-being.” - Maximus the Confessor
“The Father, Who is Justice, is not without the Son or the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit, Who kindles the heart of the faithful, is not without the Father and the Son; and the Son, Who is the plenitude of fruition, is not without the Father or the Holy Spirit; they are inseparable in Divine Majesty.” - Hildegard of Bingen
“We move through the world in a narrow groove, preoccupied with the petty things we see and hear, brooding over our prejudices, passing by the joys of life without even knowing that we have missed anything. Never for a moment do we taste the heady wine of freedom.” - Yang Chu
“Our treasures trifles seem, and all our life is dreaming, and the dreams themselves are dreams.” - Pedro Calderon
“In this immeasurable and absolute elevation of soul, forgetting all created things and liberated from them, thou shalt rise above thyself and beyond all creation to find thyself within the shaft of light that flashes out from the divine, mysterious darkness.” - St. Bonaventure
“When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.” - Blaise Pascal
“The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.” - Blaise Pascal
“It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.” - Blaise Pascal
“Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.” - Blaise Pascal
“Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul...” - Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies, and souls - in the least part of matter.... Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.” - Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“[Political] Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.” - Giambattista Vico
“Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.” - Giambattista Vico
“So the principles of such public law are to be found in the principles’ sacred history, which according to human belief is the most ancient of all those that have come down to us, including the fabulous history of the Greeks, and here they are in harmony with Plato’s doctrine, which supports the idea of providence; and they defend themselves against the doctrine of fate of the Stoics, and the doctrine of chance of the Epicureans; and they provide sanction against Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle and finally Locke, all of whom, with their similar doctrines, oppose Catholic civil principles, and, so far as it is in them to do so, show themselves capable of destroying the whole of human society.” - Giambattista Vico
“It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of maturer age are already sunk into corruption.” - Baron de Montesquieu
“Another bad effect of commerce is that the minds of men are contracted, and tendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished.” - Adam Smith
“Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impractible. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” - Edmund Burke
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” - George Washington
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” - Thomas Jefferson
“A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.” - Thomas Paine
“The origin of society, then, is to be sought, not in any natural right which one man has to exercise authority over another, but in the united consent of those who associate.” - Brutus (Antifederalist No. 84)
“Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.” - Johann von Goethe
“A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.” - Johann von Goethe
“When once I, [Care], have taken possession of a man, the whole world is of no avail to him: down on him comes perpetual darkness, the sun never rises and never sets; his outward senses are unimpaired, but night has nested in his soul, and though he may be surrounded by treasures he can make none of them his own. His happiness and unhappiness hang on whims, he starves amid abundance, he procrastinates pleasure and procrastinates toil; he looks to nothing but the future, and thus he can never have done with anything. Shall he come or shall he go? He has lost the power to decide; in the middle of an open road he gropes with hesitant half-steps. He wanders ever deeper into the maze, sees all things more and more distortedly, is a burden to himself and to others; he chokes as he draws breath, and though not choked to death he is lifeless; though not despairing, he does not accept. This helpless rolling to and fro, the painful letting-go, the irksome must-do-so, this state that now frees and now smothers, this half-sleep, this unrefreshing repose, all this rivets him fast to where he is, and makes him ready for hell.” - Johann von Goethe
“The ends crown our works, but Thou crown'st our ends.” - John Donne
“[Her eyes] let out more light, then they tooke in.” - John Donne
“When a Base Man means to be your Enemy he always begins with being your Friend.” - William Blake
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” - John Quincy Adams
“Skepticism is slow suicide.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.” - Thomas Browne
“Would you know what money is? Go borrow some.” - George Herbert
“Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim.” - Giuseppe Mazzini
“In a divine commonwealth holiness must have the principal honor and encouragement, and a great difference be made between the precious and the vile.” - Richard Baxter
“A tyrant, says Plato, must dispatch all virtuous persons, or he ceases to be safe; so that he is brought to that unhappy necessity, either to live among base and wicked persons, or not to live at all.” - Edward Sexby
“Almost all tyrants have been first captains and generals for the people, under pretences of vindicating, or defending, their liberties.
- Tyrants accomplish their ends much more by fraud than force…. with cunning plausible pretences to impose upon men’s understandings, and in the end they master those that had so little wit as to rely upon their faith and integrity.
- To put Aristotle into other words, they purge both parliament and army, till they leave few or none there that have either honour or conscience, either wit, interest, or courage to oppose their designs.
- They dare suffer no assemblies.
- In all places they have their spies.
- They stir not without a guard.
- They impoverish the people, that they may want the power, if they have the will, to attempt anything against them.
- They make war to divert and busy the people; and besides, to have a pretence to raise moneys.
- Things that are odious and distasteful they make others executioners of; and when the people are discontented they appease them with sacrificing those ministers they employ.” - Edward Sexby
“We cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or know what obedience we owe to the magistrate, or what we may justly expect from him, unless we know what he is, why he is, and by whom he is made to be what he is.... I cannot know how to obey unless I know in what, and to whom; nor in what unless I know what ought to be commanded; nor what ought to be commanded unless I understand the original right of the commander, which is the great arcanum.” - Algernon Sidney
“Too low they build who build beneath the stars.” - Edward Young
“[L]et us carry Skepticism ever so far, let us doubt, if we can, of every thing about us; we cannot doubt of what passes within ourselves. Our Passions and Affections are known to us. They are certain, whatever the Objects may be, on which they are employed.” - Earl of Shaftesbury
“They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong; though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong; yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.” - James Russell Lowell
“When you establish that the sovereignty of the people is unlimited, you create and leave to chance in human society a degree of power too large for itself and which is an evil no matter into which hands it is placed.... [I]t is the degree of force and not the depositaries of this force which must be charged. It is the weapon and not the arm you must deal with severely. There are maces too heavy for the hands of man.” - Benjamin Constant
“In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
“All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
“[In the absence of government] each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all social needs. Man, thus accustomed to seek his well-being only through his own efforts, raises himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and stronger at the same time.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
“The Constitution is a compact to which the States were parties in their sovereign capacity: now, whenever a compact is entered into by parties which acknowledge no common arbiter to decide in the last resort, each of them has a right to judge for itself in relation to the nature, extent, and obligations of the instrument.” - John Calhoun
“Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returneth, Was not spoken of the soul.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.” - Honoré de Balzac
“While the men of the Middle Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle of chosen spirits, the doctrine is upheld that the visible world was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal mover and restorer. The soul of man can by recognizing God draw Him into its narrow boundaries, but also by love of Him expand itself into the Infinite - and this is blessedness on earth.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“The whole life of Demosthenes... leave[s] the impression of a melancholy state of things, and of the brazen insolence of wickedness. A particularly striking idea of how things really were in Greece can be obtained from one feature of life – the sons who turned out badly.... the sons of gifted but arrogant fathers turned out merely arrogant, the grandsons hopeless; it is respect alone that sustains families and gives them traditions.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“The democratic State in its thirst for liberty, wanders into disreputable bars and gets drunk on too much undiluted wine. Unless the authorities are lenient in the extreme, they are accused of corruption and vilified, and those who still obey them are insulted as slavish nobodies. Popularity and honour are accorded to rulers who resemble subjects, and to subjects who resemble rulers. The same mood invades the family; the father is the equal of his son and afraid of him, while the son feels neither respect nor fear for his father. The metic is on a par with the citizen, and so is the foreigner; teachers fear and flatter their pupils, who despise their teachers and tutors; young and old compete in word and deed, the old men sit down with the young and try to make them laugh, so as to avoid seeming grumpy and superior.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” - Abraham Lincoln
“The English royalty, so strong on the morrow of the conquest, soon became oppressive and forced the barons in self-defense to unite with the burgesses. Thus the nobles saved their own rights only by securing those of their humble allies. In this manner by agreement between the burgher middle class and the nobles English public liberty was founded. Hence the nobility has always been popular in England. Liberty, the dominating sentiment of England, has created its noble institutions. The English have disregarded equality, to which the French sacrifice everything. In France the oppressor was not the petty sovereign who wore the royal crown, but feudalism. Against it the oppressed, both king and people, united, but the chief who directed the battle kept for himself all the profits of victory. Therefore instead of general liberties was developed the absolute authority of the king. Before him villeins and nobles were equally dependent, and hence arose the common sentiment of equality.” - Victor Duruy
“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.” - William James
“Mary concentrated in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prisonhouse, and suddenly seized by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a door of escape. She was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turning Hell into an ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social distinction in this world and the next.... To her, every suppliant was a universe in itself, to be judged apart, on his own merits, by his love for her, - by no means on his orthodoxy, or his conventional standing in the Church, or according to his correctness in defining the nature of the Trinity.” - Henry Adams
“Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism and dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and will always be, ‘On to God.’” - Max Planck
“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” - Theodore Roosevelt
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” - Winston Churchill
“All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil.” - John Stuart Mill
“Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.” - Alfred North Whitehead
“Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.” - James Branch Cabell
“[The magic] creates, sir, a comfortable sense of equality with your betters wherever there is least reason for it.” - James Branch Cabell
“Your friends are not religious: they are only pew-renters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only ‘frail’. They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich; not courageous: only quarrelsome; not masterful, only domineering.” - George Bernard Shaw
“Except in spots, now and then, the conduct of [WWI] in every nation was crippled by rivalries and misconceptions, chaotic, inefficient. The task was in truth formidable. The nation-at-arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as at the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions about strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states, and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.” - Jacques Barzun
“Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.” - Jacques Barzun
“The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with [Augustine’s] earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?” - Christopher Dawson
“We must recognize that we are living in an imperfect world in which human and superhuman forces of evil are at work and so long as those forces affect the political behaviour of mankind there can be no hope of abiding peace.” - Christopher Dawson
“Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.” - Albert Schweitzer
“The earth no longer has in reserve, as it had once, gifted peoples as yet unused, who can relieve us and take our place in some distant future as leaders of the spiritual life. There is not one among them which is not already taking such a part in our civilization that its spiritual fate is determined by our own. All of them, the gifted and the ungifted, the distant and the near, have felt the influence of those forces of barbarism which are at work among us. All of them are, like ourselves, diseased, and only as we recover can they recover. It is not the civilization of a race, but that of mankind, present and future alike, that we must give up as lost, if belief in a rebirth of our civilization is a vain thing.” - Albert Schweitzer
“In the last resort it is machinery and world commerce which are responsible for the World War; and the inventions which gave such mighty destructive power into our hands have given such a form of devastation to the war that it has ruined conquered and conquerors together in an inconceivably short space of time. And, again, it was our technical progress which made it possible for us to kill, as it were, at a distance and to annihilate men in great masses, so that we came to lay aside the ultimate rules of humanity and to be nothing but blind wills, the servants of perfected instruments of slaughter, unable in their annihilating activity to recognize any longer the difference between combatants and noncombatants.” - Albert Schweitzer
“We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government.” - Albert Schweitzer
“The language of these [Soviet show] trials... could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which ‘terrorism’ simply signified ‘any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.’ All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two ‘terrorists’ was a ‘conspiracy’....” - Simon Sebag Montefiore
“A reduction in forces in 1922 had slowed promotions to an imperceptible crawl; American forces were not in action anywhere.... The United States Army that [Joseph] Stilwell returned to in September 1939 ranked, with Reserves, after Portugal but ahead of Bulgaria. In percent of population under arms it ranked 45th. The active Army numbered 174,000 men, less than two-thirds the peacetime strength authorized by Act of Congress in 1920.... The continual paring of appropriations by Congress had reduced the Army, reported its new chief, General [George] Marshall, ‘to the status of a third rate power’ with less than 25 percent readiness to fight.” - Barbara Tuchman
“If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important.” - Albert Camus
“[A]bsolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.” - Leo Strauss
“There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.” - Ronald Reagan
“Remember the ‘Parable of the Talents’ in the New Testament? Christ exhorts us to be the best we can be by developing our skills and abilities, by succeeding in all our tasks and endeavors. What better description can there be of capitalism?” - Margaret Thatcher
“Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“We should not call a city happy because it attracts masses of citizens from everywhere; a fortunate city is one in which the race of the original inhabitants is best preserved.” - Isocrates
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” - Herman Melville
“His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outward over no-man’s-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood’s red bugles. To be alone and evil. To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?” - Mervyn Peake
“Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.” - Allan Bloom
“We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.” - Roger Kimball
“The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize the truth, either in himself or anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves like an animal in satisfying his vices.”- Fyodor Dostoevsky
“For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I absolutely cannot see how one can later make up for having failed to go to a good school at the proper time. For this is what distinguishes the hard school as a good school from all others: that much is demanded; and sternly demanded; that the good, even the exceptional, is demanded as the norm; that praise is rare, that indulgence is nonexistent; that blame is apportioned sharply, objectively, without regard for talent or antecedents. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.” - Oswald Spengler
“One does not reflect on a point of honor - that is already dishonor. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy - all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous.” - Oswald Spengler
“But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world's history had never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very being, of its having both existence and awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: ‘What is truth?’ lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion - What is actuality? For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history. My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him.” - Oswald Spengler
“No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order. This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. Religion is metaphysic and nothing else - ‘Credo quia absurdum’ - and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic - that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.” - Oswald Spengler
“The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.” - Miguel de Unamuno
“He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.” - Miguel de Unamuno
“Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human elements? Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth.” - Walter Pater
“‘You believe that you don’t want this law, but we assure you that you do. If you dare reject it, we shall shoot you down in order to punish you for not wanting what you do want’ and they then do so.” - Joseph de Maistre on Progressive Elites
“One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.” - Alexander Herzen
“The home is at last not merely the center, but truly the aim, the object and the purpose of all human organization. We do not seek to improve society in order that from better homes we may bring forth better servants of the state, more efficient cannon fodder for its armed forces; rather we seek to make better homes in order that we may avoid the necessity for conflict and turmoil in our world. The home is the apex and the aim, the end rather than the means of our whole social system. So far as this world knows or can vision, there is no attainment more desirable than the happy and contented home.” - Warren Harding
“Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.” - Calvin Coolidge
“America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force. No ambition, no temptation, lures her to thought of foreign dominions. The legions which she sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the cross. The higher state to which she seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.” - Calvin Coolidge
“We have too much legislating by clamor, by tumult, by pressure. Representative government ceases when outside influence of any kind is substituted for the judgment of the representative.” - Calvin Coolidge
“For, once man is declared ‘the measure of all things,’ there is no longer a true, or a good, or a just, but only opinions of equal validity whose clash can be settled only by political or military force; and each force in turn enthrones in its hour of triumph a true, a good, and a just which will endure just as long as itself.” - Bertrand de Jouvenel
“But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power, for Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.” - Bertrand de Jouvenel
“Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.” - Lord Halifax
“But there is no place for genuine ugliness, for final, unresolved self-contradiction or incoherence, in a work of art as a whole.” - Louis Arnaud Reid
“The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of that Cold War.” - Robert Conquest
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind a prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.” - Joseph de Maistre
“One must look at what [impiety] hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.” - Isaiah Berlin on Joseph de Maistre
“When one is engaged in a desperate defense of one’s world and its values, nothing can be given away, any breach in the walls might be fatal, every point must be defended to the death.” - Isaiah Berlin
“A man’s powers of creation can only be exercised fully on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs.” - Isaiah Berlin on Johann Herder
“It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past.... The problem is basically theological, and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, and literature, and all material and cultural developments in the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.” - Douglas MacArthur
“Insofar as ethics come into the picture, there is an emphasis on the importance of a controlled and courteous behavior, of manners, and of common decency, as means of redemption from the demonic component in the physiological inner man.... If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty.” - George Kennan
“Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.” - Aldous Huxley
“The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos.” - Eric Voegelin
“Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.” - Alan Keyes
“A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.” - Michael Polanyi
“Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.” - Michael Polanyi
“Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.” - George Santayana
“The world was to be freed from Christianity and feudalism; it was not to be free to become Christian and feudal again.” - George Santayana
“In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.” - George Santayana
“Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.” - George Santayana
“Permissiveness is eventually swallowed up by some form of tyranny because the time comes when it has nothing left to feed upon. As, one after another, the constituted authorities erode away under the acids of egalitarianism, the time is reached when there is nothing any longer to be permissive about. Permissiveness is like secularism in this respect, tonic only as long as there is still a solid wall of the sacred against which to tilt.” - Robert Nisbet
“These modern humanists are characteristically arrogant, opinionated, rootless, cynical, willing to sell themselves for power and affluence, ever eager to assault the public order and disturb the moral peace, and only too happy to sacrifice profundity, wisdom, and learning upon the altar of brilliance. Their presence, their incessant posturing, feuding, and caterwauling, should convince Everyman that any relief, any rebirth and renewal of society, is not immediately in view.” - Robert Nisbet
“The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” - Alasdair MacIntyre
“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” - Alasdair MacIntyre
“[The Four Points of the Compass] are the Rule of Law, Individual Rights, the Sanctity of Property, and the sense of National Identity. As you have seen, they are interconnected, they literally flow from one another, just as the false compass-points which have come to displace them - social justice, group rights, redistribution and multi-culturalism - are interconnected and flow from one another. What is multi-culturalism if not a redistribution of cultural ‘goods?’ What is redistribution if not a group right? What is a group right if not the implementation of some political activist’s version of ‘social justice?’” - Balint Vazsonyi
“The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” - George Orwell
“The most obvious manifestion of Roman society in decline was the dwindling numbers of Roman citizens. [Depopulation] was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race. Why did this civilization lose the power to reproduce itself? To cure this sickness of population the Roman rulers knew no other way than to dose it with barbarian vigor. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more till in the end the blood that flowed in its veins was not Roman but barbarian. The legions are barbarized and they barbarize the Emperor. And side by side with the barbarization of the army goes the barbarization of civil manners too. And in the end, half barbarian themselves, they have only barbarians to defend them against barbarism.” - Eileen Power
“Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.” - Richard Weaver
“My inner life is mine, and I will maintain and defend its integrity against the forces of hell.” - James Weldon Johnson
“Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“Much of the same sort of [degraded and filthy] talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“With virtually the whole European continent ranged against [Michael VIII Paleologus], no one knew better than he when to act and when to prevaricate, when to stand firm and when to concede, when to conclude an alliance and when to arrange a marriage, when to threaten, when to cajole and when to bribe.” - John Julius Norwich
“There is nothing more conducive to the destruction of a nation, whether it be republic or monarchy, than the lack of men of wisdom or intellect. When a republic has many citizens, or a monarchy many ministers, of high quality it quickly recovers from those losses that are brought about by misfortune. When such men are lacking, it falls into the very depths of disgrace. That is why I deplore the present state of the Empire which, having produced so many excellent men in the past, has now been reduced to such a level of sterility that today’s governors possess nothing to elevate them above those whom they govern.” - John VI Cantacuzenus
“Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.” - Chalmers Johnson
“Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits.... [O]ne should... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh.” - David B. Hart
The bond of Being to Non-being.
Whence is this creation?
Is it founded or not?
The presiding Deity in the skies knows it,
Or perhaps He does not.”
- Nasadiya Hymn Rigveda
“He sang Origins in depth and spells in order
how by their Creator’s leave
at the Almighty’s command
of itself the sky was born
from the sky water parted
from the water land stretched forth
on the land all growing things;
he sang of the moon’s shaping
the sun’s placing, the fixing of the sky’s pillars
heaven being filled with stars.”
- The Kalevala 17:541
“The Portal of God is nonexistence. All things sprang from nonexistence. Existence could not make existence existence. It must have proceeded from nonexistence, and nonexistence and nothing are one. Herein is the abiding place of the sage.” - Chuang Tzu
“A slave is he who cannot speak his thought.” - Euripides
“The form of government, when it has been prudently established, produces citizens distinguished for bravery, justice, and every other good quality; whereas, on the other hand, bad institutions render men cowardly, rapacious, and slaves of every foul desire.” - Dionysius of Halicarnassus
“For love of money is the disease which renders us most pitiful and grovelling, and love of pleasure is that which renders us most despicable.” - Longinus
“When Anacharsis heard what Solon was doing, he laughed at the folly of thinking that he could restrain the unjust proceedings and avarice of his citizens by written laws, which, he said, resembled in every way spiders’ webs, and would, like them, catch and hold only the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful would easily break through them.” - Plutarch
“Nor ought we ever to allow any growing power to acquire such a degree of strength as to be able to tear from us, without resistance, our natural, undisputed rights.” - Polybius
“No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.” - Cicero
“No barriers, no masses of matter, however enormous, can withstand the powers of the mind; the remotest corners yield to them; all things succumb, the very heaven itself is laid open.” - Manilius
“I am disgusted with power.” - Messala Corvinus
“As far as the stars are from the earth, and as different as fire is from water, so much do self-interest and integrity differ.” - Lucan
“To wish for death is a coward’s part.” - Ovid
“How utter, utter is the dearth of men who venture down into their own breasts, and how universally they stare at the wallet on the back of the man before them.” - Virgil
“But life is a warfare.” - Seneca
“We become wiser by adversity, prosperity destroys the idea of what is right.” - Seneca
“To be able to endure odium, is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.” - Seneca
“In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.” - Tacitus
“When the state is most corrupt, the laws are most numerous.” - Tacitus
“The wicked find it easier to coalesce for seditious purposes than for concord in peace.” - Tacitus
“To rob, to ravage, and to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.” - Tacitus
“In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness.” - Tacitus
“A small state increases by concord; the greatest falls gradually to ruin by dissension.” - Sallust
“Envy, like flames, soars upwards.” - Livy
“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” - I John 5:7-8
“The torrents of Belial overflowed their high banks.
Like a devouring fire
It destroyed every green or withered tree in its channel.
It wanders about with burning flames
Until all who drink are no more.
It pours over horizons of dry land,
Captures the foundations of mountains with fire.
The roots of flint become streams of pitch,
And it even plunges into the great abyss.
The torrents of Belial burst into Hell itself
And roar with eruptions of mud.
The earth groans in anguish
For the havoc in the universe.
The deeps howl. The living scream,
Go mad, and perish.” - Psalm 8 of the Thanksgiving Psalms (Dead Sea Scrolls)
“As the center of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by his unique, simple, and single cause and power that the principles of being become disjoined at the periphery but rather he circumscribes their extension in a circle and brings back to himself the distinctive elements of beings which he himself brought into existence. The purpose of this is so that the creations and products of the one God be in no way strangers and enemies to one another by having no reason or center for which they might show each other any friendly or peaceful sentiment or identity, and not run the risk of having their being separated from God to dissolve into non-being.” - Maximus the Confessor
“The Father, Who is Justice, is not without the Son or the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit, Who kindles the heart of the faithful, is not without the Father and the Son; and the Son, Who is the plenitude of fruition, is not without the Father or the Holy Spirit; they are inseparable in Divine Majesty.” - Hildegard of Bingen
“We move through the world in a narrow groove, preoccupied with the petty things we see and hear, brooding over our prejudices, passing by the joys of life without even knowing that we have missed anything. Never for a moment do we taste the heady wine of freedom.” - Yang Chu
“Our treasures trifles seem, and all our life is dreaming, and the dreams themselves are dreams.” - Pedro Calderon
“In this immeasurable and absolute elevation of soul, forgetting all created things and liberated from them, thou shalt rise above thyself and beyond all creation to find thyself within the shaft of light that flashes out from the divine, mysterious darkness.” - St. Bonaventure
“When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.” - Blaise Pascal
“The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.” - Blaise Pascal
“It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.” - Blaise Pascal
“Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.” - Blaise Pascal
“Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul...” - Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies, and souls - in the least part of matter.... Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.” - Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“[Political] Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.” - Giambattista Vico
“Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.” - Giambattista Vico
“So the principles of such public law are to be found in the principles’ sacred history, which according to human belief is the most ancient of all those that have come down to us, including the fabulous history of the Greeks, and here they are in harmony with Plato’s doctrine, which supports the idea of providence; and they defend themselves against the doctrine of fate of the Stoics, and the doctrine of chance of the Epicureans; and they provide sanction against Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle and finally Locke, all of whom, with their similar doctrines, oppose Catholic civil principles, and, so far as it is in them to do so, show themselves capable of destroying the whole of human society.” - Giambattista Vico
“It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of maturer age are already sunk into corruption.” - Baron de Montesquieu
“Another bad effect of commerce is that the minds of men are contracted, and tendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished.” - Adam Smith
“Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impractible. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavors, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” - Edmund Burke
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” - George Washington
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” - Thomas Jefferson
“A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.” - Thomas Paine
“The origin of society, then, is to be sought, not in any natural right which one man has to exercise authority over another, but in the united consent of those who associate.” - Brutus (Antifederalist No. 84)
“Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.” - Johann von Goethe
“A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave.” - Johann von Goethe
“When once I, [Care], have taken possession of a man, the whole world is of no avail to him: down on him comes perpetual darkness, the sun never rises and never sets; his outward senses are unimpaired, but night has nested in his soul, and though he may be surrounded by treasures he can make none of them his own. His happiness and unhappiness hang on whims, he starves amid abundance, he procrastinates pleasure and procrastinates toil; he looks to nothing but the future, and thus he can never have done with anything. Shall he come or shall he go? He has lost the power to decide; in the middle of an open road he gropes with hesitant half-steps. He wanders ever deeper into the maze, sees all things more and more distortedly, is a burden to himself and to others; he chokes as he draws breath, and though not choked to death he is lifeless; though not despairing, he does not accept. This helpless rolling to and fro, the painful letting-go, the irksome must-do-so, this state that now frees and now smothers, this half-sleep, this unrefreshing repose, all this rivets him fast to where he is, and makes him ready for hell.” - Johann von Goethe
“The ends crown our works, but Thou crown'st our ends.” - John Donne
“[Her eyes] let out more light, then they tooke in.” - John Donne
“When a Base Man means to be your Enemy he always begins with being your Friend.” - William Blake
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” - John Quincy Adams
“Skepticism is slow suicide.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.” - Thomas Browne
“Would you know what money is? Go borrow some.” - George Herbert
“Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim.” - Giuseppe Mazzini
“In a divine commonwealth holiness must have the principal honor and encouragement, and a great difference be made between the precious and the vile.” - Richard Baxter
“A tyrant, says Plato, must dispatch all virtuous persons, or he ceases to be safe; so that he is brought to that unhappy necessity, either to live among base and wicked persons, or not to live at all.” - Edward Sexby
“Almost all tyrants have been first captains and generals for the people, under pretences of vindicating, or defending, their liberties.
- Tyrants accomplish their ends much more by fraud than force…. with cunning plausible pretences to impose upon men’s understandings, and in the end they master those that had so little wit as to rely upon their faith and integrity.
- To put Aristotle into other words, they purge both parliament and army, till they leave few or none there that have either honour or conscience, either wit, interest, or courage to oppose their designs.
- They dare suffer no assemblies.
- In all places they have their spies.
- They stir not without a guard.
- They impoverish the people, that they may want the power, if they have the will, to attempt anything against them.
- They make war to divert and busy the people; and besides, to have a pretence to raise moneys.
- Things that are odious and distasteful they make others executioners of; and when the people are discontented they appease them with sacrificing those ministers they employ.” - Edward Sexby
“We cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or know what obedience we owe to the magistrate, or what we may justly expect from him, unless we know what he is, why he is, and by whom he is made to be what he is.... I cannot know how to obey unless I know in what, and to whom; nor in what unless I know what ought to be commanded; nor what ought to be commanded unless I understand the original right of the commander, which is the great arcanum.” - Algernon Sidney
“Too low they build who build beneath the stars.” - Edward Young
“[L]et us carry Skepticism ever so far, let us doubt, if we can, of every thing about us; we cannot doubt of what passes within ourselves. Our Passions and Affections are known to us. They are certain, whatever the Objects may be, on which they are employed.” - Earl of Shaftesbury
“They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong; though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong; yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.” - James Russell Lowell
“When you establish that the sovereignty of the people is unlimited, you create and leave to chance in human society a degree of power too large for itself and which is an evil no matter into which hands it is placed.... [I]t is the degree of force and not the depositaries of this force which must be charged. It is the weapon and not the arm you must deal with severely. There are maces too heavy for the hands of man.” - Benjamin Constant
“In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
“All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
“[In the absence of government] each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all social needs. Man, thus accustomed to seek his well-being only through his own efforts, raises himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and stronger at the same time.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
“The Constitution is a compact to which the States were parties in their sovereign capacity: now, whenever a compact is entered into by parties which acknowledge no common arbiter to decide in the last resort, each of them has a right to judge for itself in relation to the nature, extent, and obligations of the instrument.” - John Calhoun
“Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returneth, Was not spoken of the soul.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.” - Honoré de Balzac
“While the men of the Middle Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle of chosen spirits, the doctrine is upheld that the visible world was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal mover and restorer. The soul of man can by recognizing God draw Him into its narrow boundaries, but also by love of Him expand itself into the Infinite - and this is blessedness on earth.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“The whole life of Demosthenes... leave[s] the impression of a melancholy state of things, and of the brazen insolence of wickedness. A particularly striking idea of how things really were in Greece can be obtained from one feature of life – the sons who turned out badly.... the sons of gifted but arrogant fathers turned out merely arrogant, the grandsons hopeless; it is respect alone that sustains families and gives them traditions.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“The democratic State in its thirst for liberty, wanders into disreputable bars and gets drunk on too much undiluted wine. Unless the authorities are lenient in the extreme, they are accused of corruption and vilified, and those who still obey them are insulted as slavish nobodies. Popularity and honour are accorded to rulers who resemble subjects, and to subjects who resemble rulers. The same mood invades the family; the father is the equal of his son and afraid of him, while the son feels neither respect nor fear for his father. The metic is on a par with the citizen, and so is the foreigner; teachers fear and flatter their pupils, who despise their teachers and tutors; young and old compete in word and deed, the old men sit down with the young and try to make them laugh, so as to avoid seeming grumpy and superior.” - Jacob Burckhardt
“The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” - Abraham Lincoln
“The English royalty, so strong on the morrow of the conquest, soon became oppressive and forced the barons in self-defense to unite with the burgesses. Thus the nobles saved their own rights only by securing those of their humble allies. In this manner by agreement between the burgher middle class and the nobles English public liberty was founded. Hence the nobility has always been popular in England. Liberty, the dominating sentiment of England, has created its noble institutions. The English have disregarded equality, to which the French sacrifice everything. In France the oppressor was not the petty sovereign who wore the royal crown, but feudalism. Against it the oppressed, both king and people, united, but the chief who directed the battle kept for himself all the profits of victory. Therefore instead of general liberties was developed the absolute authority of the king. Before him villeins and nobles were equally dependent, and hence arose the common sentiment of equality.” - Victor Duruy
“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.” - William James
“Mary concentrated in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prisonhouse, and suddenly seized by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a door of escape. She was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turning Hell into an ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social distinction in this world and the next.... To her, every suppliant was a universe in itself, to be judged apart, on his own merits, by his love for her, - by no means on his orthodoxy, or his conventional standing in the Church, or according to his correctness in defining the nature of the Trinity.” - Henry Adams
“Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism and dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and will always be, ‘On to God.’” - Max Planck
“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” - Theodore Roosevelt
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” - Winston Churchill
“All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil.” - John Stuart Mill
“Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.” - Alfred North Whitehead
“Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.” - James Branch Cabell
“[The magic] creates, sir, a comfortable sense of equality with your betters wherever there is least reason for it.” - James Branch Cabell
“Your friends are not religious: they are only pew-renters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only ‘frail’. They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich; not courageous: only quarrelsome; not masterful, only domineering.” - George Bernard Shaw
“Except in spots, now and then, the conduct of [WWI] in every nation was crippled by rivalries and misconceptions, chaotic, inefficient. The task was in truth formidable. The nation-at-arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as at the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions about strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states, and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.” - Jacques Barzun
“Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.” - Jacques Barzun
“The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with [Augustine’s] earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?” - Christopher Dawson
“We must recognize that we are living in an imperfect world in which human and superhuman forces of evil are at work and so long as those forces affect the political behaviour of mankind there can be no hope of abiding peace.” - Christopher Dawson
“Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.” - Albert Schweitzer
“The earth no longer has in reserve, as it had once, gifted peoples as yet unused, who can relieve us and take our place in some distant future as leaders of the spiritual life. There is not one among them which is not already taking such a part in our civilization that its spiritual fate is determined by our own. All of them, the gifted and the ungifted, the distant and the near, have felt the influence of those forces of barbarism which are at work among us. All of them are, like ourselves, diseased, and only as we recover can they recover. It is not the civilization of a race, but that of mankind, present and future alike, that we must give up as lost, if belief in a rebirth of our civilization is a vain thing.” - Albert Schweitzer
“In the last resort it is machinery and world commerce which are responsible for the World War; and the inventions which gave such mighty destructive power into our hands have given such a form of devastation to the war that it has ruined conquered and conquerors together in an inconceivably short space of time. And, again, it was our technical progress which made it possible for us to kill, as it were, at a distance and to annihilate men in great masses, so that we came to lay aside the ultimate rules of humanity and to be nothing but blind wills, the servants of perfected instruments of slaughter, unable in their annihilating activity to recognize any longer the difference between combatants and noncombatants.” - Albert Schweitzer
“We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government.” - Albert Schweitzer
“The language of these [Soviet show] trials... could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which ‘terrorism’ simply signified ‘any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.’ All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two ‘terrorists’ was a ‘conspiracy’....” - Simon Sebag Montefiore
“A reduction in forces in 1922 had slowed promotions to an imperceptible crawl; American forces were not in action anywhere.... The United States Army that [Joseph] Stilwell returned to in September 1939 ranked, with Reserves, after Portugal but ahead of Bulgaria. In percent of population under arms it ranked 45th. The active Army numbered 174,000 men, less than two-thirds the peacetime strength authorized by Act of Congress in 1920.... The continual paring of appropriations by Congress had reduced the Army, reported its new chief, General [George] Marshall, ‘to the status of a third rate power’ with less than 25 percent readiness to fight.” - Barbara Tuchman
“If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important.” - Albert Camus
“[A]bsolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.” - Leo Strauss
“There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.” - Ronald Reagan
“Remember the ‘Parable of the Talents’ in the New Testament? Christ exhorts us to be the best we can be by developing our skills and abilities, by succeeding in all our tasks and endeavors. What better description can there be of capitalism?” - Margaret Thatcher
“Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“We should not call a city happy because it attracts masses of citizens from everywhere; a fortunate city is one in which the race of the original inhabitants is best preserved.” - Isocrates
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” - Herman Melville
“His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outward over no-man’s-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood’s red bugles. To be alone and evil. To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?” - Mervyn Peake
“Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.” - Allan Bloom
“We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.” - Roger Kimball
“The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize the truth, either in himself or anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves like an animal in satisfying his vices.”- Fyodor Dostoevsky
“For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I absolutely cannot see how one can later make up for having failed to go to a good school at the proper time. For this is what distinguishes the hard school as a good school from all others: that much is demanded; and sternly demanded; that the good, even the exceptional, is demanded as the norm; that praise is rare, that indulgence is nonexistent; that blame is apportioned sharply, objectively, without regard for talent or antecedents. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.” - Oswald Spengler
“One does not reflect on a point of honor - that is already dishonor. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy - all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous.” - Oswald Spengler
“But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world's history had never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very being, of its having both existence and awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: ‘What is truth?’ lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion - What is actuality? For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history. My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him.” - Oswald Spengler
“No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order. This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. Religion is metaphysic and nothing else - ‘Credo quia absurdum’ - and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic - that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.” - Oswald Spengler
“The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.” - Miguel de Unamuno
“He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.” - Miguel de Unamuno
“Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human elements? Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth.” - Walter Pater
“‘You believe that you don’t want this law, but we assure you that you do. If you dare reject it, we shall shoot you down in order to punish you for not wanting what you do want’ and they then do so.” - Joseph de Maistre on Progressive Elites
“One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.” - Alexander Herzen
“The home is at last not merely the center, but truly the aim, the object and the purpose of all human organization. We do not seek to improve society in order that from better homes we may bring forth better servants of the state, more efficient cannon fodder for its armed forces; rather we seek to make better homes in order that we may avoid the necessity for conflict and turmoil in our world. The home is the apex and the aim, the end rather than the means of our whole social system. So far as this world knows or can vision, there is no attainment more desirable than the happy and contented home.” - Warren Harding
“Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.” - Calvin Coolidge
“America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force. No ambition, no temptation, lures her to thought of foreign dominions. The legions which she sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the cross. The higher state to which she seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.” - Calvin Coolidge
“We have too much legislating by clamor, by tumult, by pressure. Representative government ceases when outside influence of any kind is substituted for the judgment of the representative.” - Calvin Coolidge
“For, once man is declared ‘the measure of all things,’ there is no longer a true, or a good, or a just, but only opinions of equal validity whose clash can be settled only by political or military force; and each force in turn enthrones in its hour of triumph a true, a good, and a just which will endure just as long as itself.” - Bertrand de Jouvenel
“But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power, for Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.” - Bertrand de Jouvenel
“Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.” - Lord Halifax
“But there is no place for genuine ugliness, for final, unresolved self-contradiction or incoherence, in a work of art as a whole.” - Louis Arnaud Reid
“The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of that Cold War.” - Robert Conquest
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind a prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.” - Joseph de Maistre
“One must look at what [impiety] hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.” - Isaiah Berlin on Joseph de Maistre
“When one is engaged in a desperate defense of one’s world and its values, nothing can be given away, any breach in the walls might be fatal, every point must be defended to the death.” - Isaiah Berlin
“A man’s powers of creation can only be exercised fully on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs.” - Isaiah Berlin on Johann Herder
“It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past.... The problem is basically theological, and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, and literature, and all material and cultural developments in the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.” - Douglas MacArthur
“Insofar as ethics come into the picture, there is an emphasis on the importance of a controlled and courteous behavior, of manners, and of common decency, as means of redemption from the demonic component in the physiological inner man.... If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty.” - George Kennan
“Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.” - Aldous Huxley
“The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos.” - Eric Voegelin
“Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.” - Alan Keyes
“A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.” - Michael Polanyi
“Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.” - Michael Polanyi
“Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.” - George Santayana
“The world was to be freed from Christianity and feudalism; it was not to be free to become Christian and feudal again.” - George Santayana
“In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.” - George Santayana
“Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.” - George Santayana
“Permissiveness is eventually swallowed up by some form of tyranny because the time comes when it has nothing left to feed upon. As, one after another, the constituted authorities erode away under the acids of egalitarianism, the time is reached when there is nothing any longer to be permissive about. Permissiveness is like secularism in this respect, tonic only as long as there is still a solid wall of the sacred against which to tilt.” - Robert Nisbet
“These modern humanists are characteristically arrogant, opinionated, rootless, cynical, willing to sell themselves for power and affluence, ever eager to assault the public order and disturb the moral peace, and only too happy to sacrifice profundity, wisdom, and learning upon the altar of brilliance. Their presence, their incessant posturing, feuding, and caterwauling, should convince Everyman that any relief, any rebirth and renewal of society, is not immediately in view.” - Robert Nisbet
“The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” - Alasdair MacIntyre
“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” - Alasdair MacIntyre
“[The Four Points of the Compass] are the Rule of Law, Individual Rights, the Sanctity of Property, and the sense of National Identity. As you have seen, they are interconnected, they literally flow from one another, just as the false compass-points which have come to displace them - social justice, group rights, redistribution and multi-culturalism - are interconnected and flow from one another. What is multi-culturalism if not a redistribution of cultural ‘goods?’ What is redistribution if not a group right? What is a group right if not the implementation of some political activist’s version of ‘social justice?’” - Balint Vazsonyi
“The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” - George Orwell
“The most obvious manifestion of Roman society in decline was the dwindling numbers of Roman citizens. [Depopulation] was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race. Why did this civilization lose the power to reproduce itself? To cure this sickness of population the Roman rulers knew no other way than to dose it with barbarian vigor. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more till in the end the blood that flowed in its veins was not Roman but barbarian. The legions are barbarized and they barbarize the Emperor. And side by side with the barbarization of the army goes the barbarization of civil manners too. And in the end, half barbarian themselves, they have only barbarians to defend them against barbarism.” - Eileen Power
“Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.” - Richard Weaver
“My inner life is mine, and I will maintain and defend its integrity against the forces of hell.” - James Weldon Johnson
“Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“Much of the same sort of [degraded and filthy] talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“With virtually the whole European continent ranged against [Michael VIII Paleologus], no one knew better than he when to act and when to prevaricate, when to stand firm and when to concede, when to conclude an alliance and when to arrange a marriage, when to threaten, when to cajole and when to bribe.” - John Julius Norwich
“There is nothing more conducive to the destruction of a nation, whether it be republic or monarchy, than the lack of men of wisdom or intellect. When a republic has many citizens, or a monarchy many ministers, of high quality it quickly recovers from those losses that are brought about by misfortune. When such men are lacking, it falls into the very depths of disgrace. That is why I deplore the present state of the Empire which, having produced so many excellent men in the past, has now been reduced to such a level of sterility that today’s governors possess nothing to elevate them above those whom they govern.” - John VI Cantacuzenus
“Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.” - Chalmers Johnson
“Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits.... [O]ne should... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh.” - David B. Hart