All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of art. To be honoured and even privileged by the laws, opinions, and age-old usages of our country, growing out of the prejudice of centuries, has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man. Even holding on to those privileges too tenaciously is not absolutely a crime. Every man’s strong struggle to keep possession of what belongs to him and distinguishes him is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure property and to preserve communities in a settled state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. ‘All we who are good citizens favour noble birth’ was the saying of a wise and good man [Cicero; Burke quotes him in Latin]. Indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind is a slight bias in favour of nobility. Someone who wishes to level all the institutions that have been created to give a body to opinion and to give permanence to fleeting esteem is someone who feels no ennobling principle in his own heart. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for virtue or for any image or representation of it, that sees with joy the undeserved fall of what had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land. So I was not disappointed that my inquiries and observations did not present to me any incorrigible vices in the nobility of France, or any abuse that could not be removed by a reform much less drastic than abolition. Your noblesse did not deserve punishment; and degrading is punishing. It was with the same satisfaction that I found that the result of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my ears that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. I listen sceptically to people who speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder. I suspect that vices are invented or exaggerated when profit is expected from their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. There undoubtedly were vices and abuses in the clergy. That was inevitable: it was an old establishment, and not frequently revised. But I saw no crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of their substance, or the cruel insults and degradations and the unnatural persecution that have been substituted for regulation to make things better.
— Edmund Burke, 1790
The secular community, since it exists for our natural good and not for our supernatural, has no higher end than to facilitate and safeguard the family, and friendship, and solitude. To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.
— C.S. Lewis, Membership
The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.
— C.S. Lewis
The world says: ‘You have needs—satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.’ This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
— G.K. Chesterton
Speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered to be a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul.
— Benedict XVI
Ugliness, is reassuring: it presents no challenge. It is enough to just surrender to bad luck and revel in it—it sure is comfortable enough. Beauty on the other hand, is a pledge, an undertaking: you must be able to hold on to it, you must be equal to the task, be worthy of it.
— Amélie Nothomb
Mechanical innovations, including mechanized cities, can add to our experience and stimulate our perceptive capacities, but they do not eradicate the mechanisms of human physiology. The proper size of a bedroom has not changed in thousands of years. Neither has the proper size of a door nor the proper size of a community. If cities have become immense, so much more is the need for subdividing them into comprehensible sections. Transportation systems may render the outlying parts of the city more accessible, but communities must remain individual entities whose size and appearance are comprehensible. The physical fact of scale must also be visually apparent. When these principles are violated the results are cities without human form, cities without sympathy, cities without pride. Worse still are the effects on the spirit and human sensitivities of its people.
— Paul D. Spreiregen, 1965
An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbage- field that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system— Republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can’t do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.
— G.K. Chesterton
Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers.
— Leopold Kohr
Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.
— E.F. Schumacher
The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness.
— G.K. Chesterton
Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were, indeed, the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.
— Edmund Burke
Technology alienates those who depend on it and live by it. It deadens their human qualities and their moral perceptiveness. Gradually, everything becomes centered on the most efficient use of machines and techniques of production, and the style of life, the culture, the tempo and the manner of existence responds more and more to the needs of the technological process itself. Unfortunately it is too often assumed that the technological process is inevitably rational. This is not the case. It is sometimes highly irrational—to the point that what is good for the process may be very bad indeed for humans.
— Thomas Merton, 1967
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