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“Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas: Unzeitgemäße Gedanken

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
― Augustine of Hippo, City of God

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
― Taylor Caldwell, A Pillar of Iron

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”
― Benito Mussolini

“In a 50-50 life or death crisis, choose death.”
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own”
― Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee �� Wisdom for the Way

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].”
― Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2

“A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can.

It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune make for a finer, nobler type of manhood.

Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one’s manliness–to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.

But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.”
― Yukio Mishima

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
― Anonymous Greek Proverb

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
― Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. ”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“What, more realistically, is this “mutation,�� the “new man��? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker�� and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open�� to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker�� after some “new revelation,�� ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact�� because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible��; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,�� yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus��; the “rebel,�� hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,�� this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced�� and “simplified�� and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,�� is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.”
― Confucius

“No man is free who cannot control himself.”
― Pythagoras

“beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”
― Plato, The Republic