“Europe's rise is written in the terms of Christianity and Monarchy; Europe's decay in the terms of Republicanism, Progressivism, and Godlessness."

~Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

'Now every step forward of technological advance is introduced into our lives under the guise of convenience. But that convenience is only measurable in terms of an economic efficiency and has no regard for the self-fulfilment of the worker. When we speak today of ”creating jobs” we know we mean “occupying posts”.'

'Having destroyed the organic link between the worker and his accomplishments the factory system needed the worker merely to expend his energies on tasks the outcome of which had little or no bearing on life except to postpone starvation. His was not the responsibility to decide what shall be made, or how. His was simply to slave irresponsibly at the behest of those who held the monopoly on profits.' - Brian Keeble

Scene from the 1927 film 'Metropolis'

"Pride is denial of God, an invention of the devil, the despising of men, the mother of contamination, the offspring of praise, a foothold for Satan, a source of anger, a door of hypocrisy, the support of demons, the guardian of sins, the rejection of compassion, an opponent of God, a root of blasphemy."

+John Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent

“Men's hearts are failing them for fear, not knowing any longer where to rest. We look this way and that way, and catch at one another like drowning men. Go where you will, you find the same phenomena. Science grows, and observers are adding daily to our knowledge of the nature and structure of the material universe, but they tell us nothing, and can tell us nothing, of what we most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is. We had a belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely on the unknown ocean; but the philosophers and critics have been boring holes in the timbers to examine the texture of the wood, and now it leaks at every one of them. We have to help ourselves in the best way that we can.”

~James Anthony Froude

"We are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life we have made impossible."

~Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has - remained sensitive and able to feel; who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for-sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity.

He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane fociety, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves."

~Erich Fromm

"Beauty awakens the soul to act."

~Dante Alighieri

"What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level."

~C. S. Lewis

"After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear."

~J.R.R. Tolkien

"There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society, successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."

~Will Durant

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid."

~Livy

“You will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

~C.S. Lewis

“Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and oppression, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder, we are not going to be judged.”

~Czesław Miłosz

"It must be recognised that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator.”

~Nikolai Berdyaev

“The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Against this panorama of nations, morals, and religions rising and falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Is it only the vain and traditional boast of each "modern" generation? Since we have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends - the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is power"! Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed art and mythology rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes."

~Will Durant

“Our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance... We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.”

~Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The study of the past is an exercise in humility; while the smug are nervously trammeled up in their self-opinion, the humble are free to rejoice in what is genuinely great or noble or beautiful. The adulator of the new must believe that a great oblong in brick and glass and steel marks an ‘advance’ in every respect from Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, but the humble student of history has no stake in that game. He is free to wonder at the glory that a supposedly benighted people could accomplish—and then free to wonder where the real artistic darkness is to be found, then or now.”

~Anthony Esolen

“The Socialist saw plainly the rights of the Society; the Anarchist saw the rights of the Individual. How therefore were these to be reconciled? The Church stepped in at that crucial point and answered, By the Family—whether domestic or Religious. For in the Family you have both claims recognized: there is authority and yet there is liberty. For the union of the Family lies in Love; and Love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.”

~Robert Hugh Benson

"Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom."

~G.K. Chesterton