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

~Leopold Kohr

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

~Leopold Kohr

"Perhaps, the good and the beautiful are the same, and must be investigated by one and the same process; and in like manner the base and the evil. And in the first rank we must place the beautiful, and consider it as the same with the good; from which immediately emanates intellect as beautiful. Next to this, we must consider the soul receiving its beauty from intellect, and every inferior beauty deriving its origin from the forming power of the soul, whether conversant in fair actions and offices, or sciences and arts. Lastly, bodies themselves participate of beauty from the soul, which, as something divine, and a portion of the beautiful itself, renders whatever it supervenes and subdues, beautiful as far as its natural capacity will admit. Let us, therefore, re-ascend to the good itself, which every soul desires; and in which it can alone find perfect repose. For if anyone shall become acquainted with this source of beauty he will then know what I say, and after what manner he is beautiful..."

"...Indeed, whatever is desirable is a kind of good, since to this desire tends. But they alone pursue true good, who rise to intelligible beauty, and so far only tend to good itself; as far as they lay aside the deformed vestments of matter, with which they become connected in their descent. Just as those who penetrate into the holy retreats of sacred mysteries, are first purified and then divest themselves of their garments, until someone by such a process, having dismissed everything foreign from the God, by himself alone, beholds the solitary principle of the universe, sincere, simple and pure, from which all things depend, and to whose transcendent perfections the eyes of all intelligent natures are directed, as the proper cause of being, life and intelligence. With what ardent love, with what strong desire will he who enjoys this transporting vision be inflamed while vehemently affecting to become one with this supreme beauty!"

~Plotinus

"We should not be surprised if God is so rarely encountered now. The consumer culture is one without sacrifices; easy entertainment distracts us from our metaphysical loneliness. The rearranging of the world as an object of appetite obscures its meaning as a gift. The defacing of eros and the loss of rites of passage eliminate the old conception of human life as an adventure within the community and an offering to others. It is inevitable, therefore, that moments of sacred awe should be rare among us... Our world contained many openings onto the transcendental; but they have been blocked by waste. You may think that this does not matter—that mankind has had enough of sacred mysteries and their well-known dangers. But I think we are none of us at ease with the result. Our disenchanted life is, to use the Socratic idiom, ‘not a life for a human being’. By remaking human beings and their habitat as objects to consume rather than subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both."

~Roger Scruton

"Of what use is existence to the creature if it cannot know its Maker? How could men be reasonable beings if they had no knowledge of the Word and Reason of the Father, through Whom they had received their being? They would be no better than the beasts, had they no knowledge save of earthly things; and why should God have made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact, the good God has given them a share in His own Image, that is, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and has made even themselves after the same Image and Likeness. Why? Simply in order that through this gift of Godlikeness in themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through Him to apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life."

+Saint Athanasius

“Anyone wishing to conquer a people could do it by using this system: breaking its ties with heaven and land, introducing fratricidal quarrels and fights, promoting immorality and licentiousness, by material ruin, physical poisoning, drunkenness. All these destroy a nation more than being blasted by thousands of cannon or bombed by thousands of airplanes.”

~Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

"At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the universe. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colors, smells, sounds and tastes, finally solidity itself.… As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves.”

~C.S. Lewis

“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”

~G.K. Chesterton

"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."

~Plato

"The pervasive, almost ubiquitous acceptance of various kinds of emotivism and subjectivism in modern Western culture means there can be no *persuasion*--that is to say, no rational argument leading to a freely adopted change of mind. Rather, as belief in objective value evaporates and the public square is evaporated of practical reason, what passes for moral discourse increasingly resembles a war zone in which political propagandists, commercial interests, private whims, and animal instincts fight tooth and nail in a permanent free-for-all."

~Michael Ward

“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

In most Ages, the normal path to improving one’s financial standing was the same as the path of personal improvement. In anomalous Ages [such as ours], when money is itself all that matters, fortune is made through moral relaxation, lack of consciousness, participation in frauds and scams, and businesses which scandalise all those with an inkling of Traditional Values

— Dr. Manuel Leal Freire, Cartas Políticas

"The decline of moral habit produces, in its first stage, a rigid and exalted moralism; and in its second, an immoralism raised to the level of doctrine; sooner or later, it invariably gives birth to the lowest level of immorality.”

~Gustave Thibon

"If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take for certain the opposite of what the liar tells us. But the reverse of truth has a thousand shapes and a boundless field."

~Montaigne

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

~Plato

"The truth is that any advance in science leaves morality in its ancient balance; and it depends still on the inscrutable soul of man whether any discovery is mainly a benefit or mainly of calamity. This is, perhaps, the strongest argument for a morality superior to materialism, and a religion that refuses to be bullied by science. Moral progress must still be made morally; and a modern scientist, who has invented the most complex mechanism, or liberated the most subtle gas, has still exactly the same spiritual problem before him as that which confronted Cain, when he stood with a ragged stone in his hand."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes."

~Peter Kreeft