“Divorce takes all authority from the father, all dignity from the mother, all security from the child, and transforms domestic society into a struggle between strength and weakness; it constitutes the family as a temporary lease, where the inconstancy of the human heart stipulates its passions, and which ends where new passions begin.”

~Louis de Bonald

When a man walks in the fear of God he knows no fear, even if he were to be surrounded by wicked men. He has the fear of God within him and wears the invincible armor of faith. This makes him strong and able to take on anything, even things which seem difficult or impossible to most people.

+St. Symeon the New Theologian

"There are wolves hiding in the gray flock; characters who still know what freedom is. This is a ruler's worst nightmare."

~Ernst Jünger

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

~Russell Kirk

"For wherever the soul of man may turn, unless it turns to you, it clasps sorrow to itself. Even though it clings to things of beauty, if their beauty is outside God and outside the soul, it only clings to sorrow."

+St Augustine, The Confessions

"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

“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

"Whatever passion a man does not bravely war against, is an object of his affection; and it holds him fast, and weighs him down, it becomes to him a hindrance and a fetter, preventing his mind from going up to God..."

+St Macarius the Great

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

~Victor Hugo

"Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself. Life has no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume."

~Erich Fromm

"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

"Wherever God is – there is peace. And the opposite is self-evident: wherever there is envy, enmity, impatience, self love – there is the devil. Wherever the devil is – there, everything is ruinous, proud, and hostile."

+Saint Anatoly of Optina

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

~G.K. Chesterton

"The glory of wealth and physical beauty is fluid and fragile; but virtue is held brilliant and eternal."

~Sallust

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

~Jeremy Kee

"The 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

"He that fears God fears nothing else."

~Edmund Burke

“A great deal of the current cult of pleasure, of luxury, of liberty in love, and all the rest of it, appears to me to be perfectly childish; and childish in the literal sense that it is greedy without any grasp of consequences.”

~G.K. Chesterton

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

~Leszek Kołakowski

"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