Notable Quotable 384

May 09, 2025

A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the ‘class struggle’... Autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.

- Valentin Tomberg

Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.

- Alan Moore

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let every new year find you a better man.

- Ben Franklin

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

- Aldous Huxley

If you're still looking to a person to save you, you're already doomed, no matter who it is.

- Larken Rose

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The mere omission (let alone contempt) of the great Being in any human endeavour brands it with an irrevocable anathema. Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force... When we reflect on the attested facts of all history, when we understand that in the chain of human institutions, from those that have marked the great turning points in history down to the smallest social organization, from empires down to brotherhoods, all have a divine foundation, and that human power, whenever it isolates itself, can only give its works a false and passing existence...

- Joseph de Maistre

If the western Middle Ages was dominated by the approach to realism that is Thomism, then the transition of modern times in the era of Protestant reformation has become increasingly dominated by nominsalism. It is the idea of the new man. Nominalism best describes a spirit of modernity, because nominalism is based on the conviction that there are no sacred realities. It rests on the assumption that all that exists is a world of material things and the human mind constructs ideas and concepts on the basis solely of observation. For the more efficient means to manipulate nature, rationalism began to abstract, giving names to things that are arbitrary vocal equivalents. The sacred intuition of being in the world, the penetration into its sacred dimension, into the experience of divine presence is discarded, as the empiricist falsifies the picture of the observed world. The empirical nominalist approach created a radical desacralization of the world.

- A.G. Dugin

We are the last. Almost the ones after the last. Immediately after us begins the world we call, which we have called, which we shall not cease calling, the modern world. The world that tries to be clever. The world of the intelligent, of the advanced, of those who know, who don't have to be shown a thing twice, who have nothing more to learn. That is to say: the world of those who believe in nothing.

- Charles Peguy, 1910

Parliament today means Plutocracy. The beastly condition of Parliament is a byword. The atmosphere of bribery and blackmail – it is rather a stench than an atmosphere – is the very air of what is called ‘Politics.’ Until you have got rid of that you can do nothing. So long as the legislative machine is controlled by and composed of the monopolists, all effort at restoring healthy economic life will fail.

- Hilaire Belloc

All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy.

- Victor Hugo