live not by lies

a collection of quotes and excerpts

[mollitheia]

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (2008), p.64

[mollitheia]

To recognise untruth as a condition of life; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

[mollitheia]

What science has done is to increase the proportion of your life in which you are a cog, to the extent of endangering what is due to you as a hero or as a common man.

Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1953)

[mollitheia]

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1953)

[mollitheia]

[Liberalism] has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities—unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

[mollitheia]

What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our 'consent.' It is making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism supposed was our nature in that 'state of nature' that existed before the coming of civilisation, law and government. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

[mollitheia]

Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Matthew 26:41

[mollitheia]

In contrast to its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious: as an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer's operating system goes largely unseen–until it crashes. Liberalism becomes daily more visible precisely because its deformations are becoming too obvious to ignore.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

[mollitheia]

Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (2003)

[mollitheia]

If there is no authority beyond the government, they are god.

Frank Turek

[mollitheia]

What is truth? To the person for whom this is a vital, burning question, the compromise of liberalism and humanism becomes impossible. He who wants and with his whole being has asked this, can never again be satisfied with what the world is content to take in place of truth.

Fr. Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (1994)

[mollitheia]

Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I'm stepping over it.

Jonathan Bowden

[mollitheia]

Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, "Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?" And Jesus answered and said to them: Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name's sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then end will come."

Matthew 24:3–14

[mollitheia]

The sins of the clergy do not relieve the people from their responsibilities before God.

Orthodox Study Bible (p.1313)

[mollitheia]

Today we find ourselves at the end of a cycle. Already, for centuries, at first insensibly, then with the momentum of a landslide, multiple processes have destroyed every normal and legitimate human order in the West and falsified every higher conception of living, acting, knowing, and fighting. And the momentum of this fall, its velocity, its giddiness, has been called ‘progress’. And we have raised hymns to ‘progress’ and deluded ourselves that this civilisation—a civilisation of matter and machines—was civilisation par excellence, the one for which the entire history of the world was preordained: until the final consequences of this entire process has been such as to cause some people at least to wake up.

Julius Evola, A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth

[mollitheia]

At the basis of existentialism, one must only acknowledge the truth of a fragmented human being, who has come to identify existence itself with its lowest and most irrational levels, with its darkest and most senseless expressions, wallowing in a sort of self-sadism. Against all this, let us clearly perceive that ‘existence’ is not the last resort, that existence actually only reaches fulfillment in those who cast their gaze beyond it, those who are capable of subordinating mere living to something more than living.

Julius Evola, A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth 

[mollitheia]

Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving.

Sir John Bagot Glubb, Fate of Empires (1976)