“It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.”

~Hilaire Belloc

"No large scale society has ever held together for long without a religion."

~Bruce Carlton

"No lasting civilisation will ever be founded upon philosophical and social ideologies."

~Alexis Carrel

The heroic quality rejoices in the struggles by which its virtue is approved, and glories in the triumph with which it is finally adorned. — B.M. Palmer

"A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."

~C.S. Lewis

“One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”

~C.S. Lewis

"There are two ways of getting home; one of them is to stay there. The other one is to walk around the whole world til we come back to the same place."

~G.K. Chesterton

"The end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

~T.S. Eliot

"The doctrinal intolerance of the Church has saved the world from chaos. Her doctrinal intolerance has placed beyond question political, domestic, social, and religious, truths—primitive and holy truths, which are not subject to discussion, because they are the foundation of all discussions; truths which cannot be called into doubt for a moment without the understanding on that moment oscillating, lost between truth and error, and the clear mirror of human reason becoming soiled and obscured…"

~Juan Donoso Cortés

"There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state might be a fallen state... For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy that threatens even that minimum consensus of values necessary for a political state."

~Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."

"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice."

~Neil Postman

"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Place people in sight of the pyramids of Egypt, and they will tell you, “Here has passed a grand and barbarous civilisation.” Place them in sight of the Grecian statues and temples, and they will tell you, “Here has passed a graceful, ephemeral, and brilliant civilisation.” Place them in sight of a Roman monument, and they will tell you, “Here has passed a great people.” Place them in sight of a cathedral, and on beholding such majesty united to such beauty, such grandeur to such taste, such grace to such delicacy, such severe unity to such rich variety, such measure to such boldness, such heaviness in the stones, with such suavity in their outlines, and such wonderful harmony between silence and light, shade and colour, they will tell you..."

"Here has passed the greatest people of history, and the most astounding of human civilisations: that people must have taken grandeur from the Egyptian, brilliancy from the Greek, strength from the Roman, and, beyond the strength, the brilliancy, and grandeur, something more valuable than grandeur, strength, and brilliancy—immortality and perfection."

~Juan Donoso Cortes

“The wise men of antiquity, when they wished to make the whole world peaceful and happy, first put their own states into proper order. Before putting their states into proper order, they regulated their own families. Before regulating their families, they regulated themselves. Before regulating themselves, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before being sincere in their thoughts, they tried to see things exactly as they really were.”

~Confucius

“Science alone is untrue because it aims exclusively at truth—divorced from the good and the beautiful. The scientific mind is far too simple. There are too many facts in too mysterious a relationship for his simple mind—logical analytical as it is—to grasp. In theory he is right; in practice he can never get all the facts as long as he specializes exclusively in the nature of discursive reason. For knowledge—as distinct from wisdom and plastic form—of its very nature excludes all facts.”

~Carl Schmitt

“More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages.”

~Roy Campbell, 1901-1957

"It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unaware of the tragedy.

Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because they have no standard outside of themselves by which to measure their times. If there is no fixed concept of justice, how shall men know it is violated?

Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world; the great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on, because they have lost the vision of the heights from which they have fallen.”

~Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

"Technology alienates those who depend on it and live by it. It deadens their human qualities and their moral perceptiveness. Gradually, everything becomes centered on the most efficient use of machines and techniques of production, and the style of life, the culture, the tempo and the manner of existence responds more and more to the needs of the technological process itself. Unfortunately it is too often assumed that the technological process is inevitably rational. This is not the case. It is sometimes highly irrational—to the point that what is good for the process may be very bad indeed for humans.”

~Thomas Merton

"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!"

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

"I saw the snares of the devil sprawled out across the world. And so I asked 'How can one possibly avoid them?' And a strong voice came from above and said, 'Humility.'"

+St. Anthony the Great

"The power of the Good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful."

~Plato

"The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional smallscale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a smallscale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system."

~Theodore Kaczynski