Notable Quotable 217

Feb 28, 2024

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There is no profit in studying doctrines unless the life of one’s soul is acceptable and conforms to God’s will. The cause of all evils is delusion, self-deception and ignorance of God.

- St. Anthony the Great

The hero can never be a relativist... The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace.[...] In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.

- Richard M. Weaver

We have everything upside down. Where we should be idealists- our moral, economic, and religious lives, we are pragmatic realists. Where we should be realists- our political life, we are instead intransigent idealists.

- E.H. Looney

No traditional civilization has ever seen such large masses condemned to obscure, soulless, automatic labor, to slavery which does not even have as its counterpart the high stature and the tangible reality of figures of lords and rulers, but is found imposed in a seemingly innocuous way by the tyranny of the economic factor and the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And the fact that the modern vision of life, in its materialism, has deprived the individual of any possibility of introducing into his destiny an element of transfiguration, of seeing in it a sign and a symbol, the slavery of today is the most gloomy and the most desperate of all that we have ever known.

- Julius Evola

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What is this thing we call government? Is it anything but organized violence? The law orders you to obey, and if you don't obey, it will compel you by force all governments, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or fear of punishment.

- Alexander Berkman

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

- Helen Keller

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

No duty is more urgent than giving thanks.

- James Allen

A people consists of a complex of relationships and attitudes, and as such, there is another, far greater threat to it than physical destruction or loss of independence, it is that of dissolution. If men no longer feel as members of the same body, if the climate of trust that unites them disappears, if the symbols they have in common no longer have the same meaning for them... if the moral life of the people disappears. This loss of a moral existence is not due to sudden external causes, but to internal phenomena and dissociators: byproducts of progress.

- Bertrand de Jouvenel