Notable Quotable 60

Feb 28, 2023

In an healthy society, it shouldn't require heroic virtue just to live a healthy, normal life.

- Nick B. Steves

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 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

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilisation.

- Lugwig von Mises

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

- Henry Miller

Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Men's minds, once unbalanced, are ready to believe anything.

- Tacitus

While liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade.

- Murray Rothbard

Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost a different species.

A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organised insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.

- Bertrand Russell

Hell is truth seen too late.

- Thomas Hobbs