Notable Quotable 368

Jan 10, 2025

In an age of 'anything goes', virtue is a revolutionary thing. In an age of rebellion, authority is the radical idea. In an age of pell-mell 'progress' to annihilation, tradition is the hero on the white horse.

- Peter Kreeft

Progress is pure illusion. It affects only the sphere of matter, while the spirit is rigorously degraded. What our contemporaries pass off as achievements are in fact shameful vices: the rejection of religion as prejudice, immorality as the overcoming of complexes, contempt for the past as swaggering ignorance, the ephemerality of fashion as the absolutization of vanity. Stupidity is raised to the norm, the development of the media is accompanied by the fact that the information is so small that there is no need to transmit it. Reality slips through our fingers, becomes illusory. Aristocratic ideals are replaced by vile tastes of the crowds, the market and entertainment, social conformity and intellectual anarchy, arrogant stupidity and arrogant insignificance. According to Guénon, the modern world is worthy only of contempt and disgust. And not in some particular aspect, but in its entirety.

- A.G. Dugin

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance... In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

- Neil Postman

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it’s pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We’re on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

- C.S. Lewis

The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth... It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value...

- Ananda Coomaraswamy

Strike.Me

Buy Me a Coffee

Our progress in science and technique has involved some tincture of evil with good. Our comforts and conveniences may have weakened our physical stamina and our moral fiber. We have immensely developed our means of locomotion, but some of us use them to facilitate crime... We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour as when we had legs. We applaud the cures and incisions of modern medicine if they bring no side effects worse than the malady; we appreciate the assiduity of our physicians in their mad race with the resilience of microbes and the inventiveness of disease; we are grateful for the added years that medical science gives us if they are not a burden–some prolongation of disability. We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village.

- Will Durant

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

The Secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

- Sokrates

Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me.

- Sojourner Truth

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.

- H.L. Mencken