“Do we want a Brazil that is truly Brazilian? Then let us make one that that is entirely Catholic. Do we want to kill the very soul of Brazil? Then let us tear out its Faith.”
— Father J.A. de Silva, 1939
“Even if I were to see various difficulties in this project (of reevaluating the ideas and principles from the very basics, tearing bad or inconsistent ones down to replace them with better ideas), they weren’t insurmountable, and weren’t comparable with the difficulties involved in reforming even minor matters affecting public institutions. These large bodies are too difficult to reconstruct once they are overthrown—indeed, too difficult to prop up once they have been shaken—and when they fall there is bound to be a crash. Furthermore, if they have imperfections —and their very diversity ensures that many of them do—these have doubtless been much smoothed over by custom; and custom has even prevented or imperceptibly corrected many imperfections that couldn’t be dealt with so well by conscious planning. And a last point: it is almost always easier to put up with their imperfections than to put up with changes in them, just as it is much better to follow the main roads that wind through mountains, which have gradually become smooth and convenient through frequent use, than to try to follow a straighter route that has one clambering over rocks and descending into canyons.
That is why I can’t in any way approve of those meddlesome and restless characters who, without being called by birth or by fortune to the management of public affairs, are yet forever thinking up some new reform.”
—René Descartes
“To the strong there is no such thing as free will; for free will implies an alternative, and the strong man has no alternative. His ruling instinct leaves him no alternative, allows him no hesitation or vacillation. Strength of will is the absence of free will. If to the weak man strong will appears to have an alternative, it is a total misapprehension on his part.”
— Anthony Ludovici
Low time preference.
“Since Napoleonic times liberalism has captured the minds of our educated classes. Pseudo-intellectuals (Nietzsche’s ‘cultural philistines’) and ivory-tower scholars, shut off from the real world by a barrier of abstract knowledge, have been its staunchest defenders.”
— Oswald Spengler
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
— Edmund Burke
“Once broken, not all the tinkering of the sociologists can put the home together again.”
— Ricard Weaver
(slightly paraphrased)
“Growing into the roots of tradition lengthens life backward.”
— James Hillman
“Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil.”
— Russell Kirk
“Commerce in society is what the natural need to eat and drink is in man. Man cannot make eating and drinking his principal concern without falling into the deepest degradation and totally forgetting his duties. A people which places commerce in the rank of social institutions, which sees a duty in it rather than a need, which, by every means possible, gives it an unlimited extension, instead of enclosing it within the bounds of the indispensably necessary, may dazzle by the brilliance of its enterprises and the magnitude of its successes; but its physical prosperity conceals degraded souls and abject morals: it is a wholly material people.”
— Louis de Bonald
Cherish the mystical, for there is already far too much of the rational in this world.
“How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing, it is irresistible.”
— C.S. Lewis
“The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.”
— Martin Heidegger
“Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.”
— Thomas Sowell
“I believe that all the euphoria about Europe has led many of us to forget that Europe is a conglomerate of different entities and countries. If you don’t love your own entity, if you don’t know your roots and can no longer relate to them, you will also have problems with the rest of Europe. A tree without roots will fall over, whereas a tree with roots eventually becomes part of a forest.”
— Queen Margrethe II of Denmark