Douban bio
Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding. - David Hume Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served: deny it food and it will gobble poison. - Clive S. Lewis An ancient axiom of politics teaches that a spoiled people invite despotic control. Their failure to maintain internal discipline is followed by some rationalized organization in the service of a single powerful will. In this particular, at least, history, with all her volumes vast, has but one page. - Richard M. Weaver There is the belief that the expansion of the material and intellectual powers of mankind is always Progress. This has its, at first not always visible, limits. And the more the faith in Progress, including its implicit optimism, presses against these limits, the ever greater are the dangers. Perhaps one can illustrate this with a simile. With the seemingly limitless extension of its material powers mankind seems to be in the situation of a captain, whose great ship is so strongly built of steel and iron that his magnetic compass indicates the ferrous mass of the vessel, but not the position of the magnetic North. Such a ship cannot reach its goal; it will sail around in circles and eventually become a subject of the winds and the tides. … This danger exists so long as the captain fails to realize that his compass no longer reacts to the magnetic forces of the earth. - Werner Heisenberg If the man, who is called to the hard sacrifice of his own ego to the common good, loses the support of the eternal and the divine, that comforting and consoling faith in a God who rewards all good and punishes all evil, then the result of the majority will be, not the acceptance, but the refusal of their duty. - Pope Pius XI Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. - Gilbert K. Chesterton To call obsolete what has merely ceased to be intelligible is a vulgar error. - Nicolás G. Dávila So long as the proletarian is governed by purely economic motives, he remains a bourgeois at heart. - Christopher Dawson The urban conservative, on the other hand, is nothing but an inhibited "progressive." - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn The wars of the revolution and the empire had buried millions of people in vain. They had destroyed what was left of small nationalities and independent polities. After having trampled on all treaties and acquired rights, they had succeeded in making the absolutism of the old regime boundless. - Émile Keller The human race had instituted the nobility of virtue, the revolution instituted that of crime. - Juan Donoso Cortés Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. - T. S. Eliot The bourgeoisie is simply socialist. It maintains in religion and morality precisely the principle from which socialism deduces its economic practice. When the bourgeoisie says that it is not socialist, it knows very little what it says, it does not know what it thinks. It is socialist even by the economic root. Listen to them speak of the invasions of the Church, the encroachments of religious orders, a better distribution of capital, its mobilization, mortgage banks, public finance, credit expansion, etc., etc. -- as many pledges offered to socialism. - Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet It does not follow that those who are loved should be cruelly left to yield themselves with impunity to their bad will; but in so far as power is given, they ought to be both prevented from evil and compelled to good. - St. Augustine of Hippo The state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and "progress," thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go bankrupt. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief. - Jacob Burckhardt "Government" implies a centralized, institutionalized state with a clear chain of command and responsibility. Modern politics are largely about determining who controls such states and what policies they should pursue. - Peter H. Wilson