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Post by Stephen on Nov 29, 2018 12:05:03 GMT
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” Gustav Mahler
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Post by cato on Nov 29, 2018 23:07:47 GMT
Great idea for a thread Stephen. I ll post a few later.
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Post by Stephen on Nov 30, 2018 11:19:49 GMT
"The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest." "I die the king's faithful servant, but God's first." St Thomas More
“Europe's rise is written in the terms of Christianity & Monarchy, Europe's decay in the terms of Republicanism, Progressivism & Godlessness.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
“It is impious to say, ‘I respect every religion.’ This is as much as to say: I respect the devil as much as God, vice as much as virtue, falsehood as much as truth, dishonesty as much as honesty, Hell as much as Heaven.”
—Fr. Michael Müller,
“The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other. ”
Walter Bagehot
"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."
C.S. Lewis
"Democracy is the counting of heads, not what’s in them!"
Padraig Deignan
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Post by cato on Dec 1, 2018 16:02:45 GMT
Hanlon's razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
General George Patton ; If everyone is thinking alike then someone isn't thinking.
Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
Jeremiah the Prophet ; Halt at the crossroads, look well and ask yourselves which path it was that stood you in good stead long ago. That path follow and you shall find rest for your souls.
Fr Faber ; All change is bad!
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Post by Tomas on Dec 2, 2018 16:39:33 GMT
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Dec 6, 2018 15:16:26 GMT
"Reform? Aren't things bad enough already?"
Variously attributed, generally to some fire-breathing old Tory around the time of the Great Reform Act.
"By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer." Edmund Burke.
"All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion." Edmund Burke
"Here you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it — or thinks he would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries that we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition — all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things that Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic writer said recently that Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. With the Fascist movement in front of our eyes we cannot write this off as a merely silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too- rational and too- comfortable world." George Orwell. (I realize I have quoted this elsewhere.)
"It would be much more rational to abolish the English monarchy. But how, if by doing so, you leave out the one element in our state which matters most? How if the monarchy is the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship—loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendor, ceremony, continuity—trickle down to irrigate the dust bowl of modern economic statecraft?" C.S. Lewis.
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Post by cato on Dec 6, 2018 18:00:32 GMT
The 3 laws of politics.
1)Everyone is conservative about the things he knows best.
2)Any organisation not explicitly right wing sooner or later becomes left wing.
3) The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Attributed to Robert Conquest.
I am particularly fond of point 3.It explains most of modern life.
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Post by Tomas on Dec 7, 2018 12:54:52 GMT
"Democracy is the counting of heads, not what’s in them!"
Padraig Deignan
Who was this man? No politician supposedly.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Dec 7, 2018 13:01:24 GMT
2)Any organisation not explicitly right wing sooner or later becomes left wing. And, quite often, organisations which ARE explicitly right-wing become left-wing. Most mainstream conservative parties today, for instance. The editor of a small magazine for which I used to write told me that he deliberately chose to let it die after he retired, for fear of it falling foul of this tendency. This despite the fact that he had a potential buyer for it.
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Post by cato on Dec 10, 2018 18:12:24 GMT
The line separating good and evil passes not through states , nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us , it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil , one small bridgehead of hope is retained.
The Gulag Archipelago.
Solzhenitsyn was born 100 years ago tomorrow. I am going to reread the Harvard address in his honour. This was meant to be my 1500th post but I forgot so it's the 1501st which really hasn't the same sense of occcasion about it.
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Post by Tomas on Jan 1, 2019 18:01:50 GMT
"I have come to that age when one can be proud over one´s enemies."
I love this quote, it strikes elderly wisdom and also could be a most endearing companion in our present times of hostile anti-life/christian tepidity, culture of bleakness.
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Post by assisi on Jan 2, 2019 13:25:53 GMT
"The Liberal premise is Rousseau's notion that man is born free yet is everywhere in chains. That the problems of the world is that the institutions are wrong. Nothing in human nature could cause us to be unhappy - the fact is that we have the wrong institutions. The Conservative premise is that man is flawed from day one and there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs and whatever you do to deal with one of man's flaws it creates another problem. You try to get the best trade-off you can get and that's all you can hope for." Thomas Sowell, American economist and political commentator. 4 minute video where he says this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHdhrNhh88
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Jan 2, 2019 13:38:52 GMT
"The Liberal premise is Rousseau's notion that man is born free yet is everywhere in chains. That the problems of the world is that the institutions are wrong. Nothing in human nature could cause us to be unhappy - the fact is that we have the wrong institutions. The Conservative premise is that man is flawed from day one and there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs and whatever you do to deal with one of man's flaws it creates another problem. You try to get the best trade-off you can get and that's all you can hope for." Thomas Sowell, American economist and political commentator. 4 minute video where he says this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHdhrNhh88The funny thing is, although many liberals do take this Rousseauian optimistic view in theory, in practice they have an incredibly bleak view of human nature-- everybody is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. etc. Doubtless they think our institutions have made us that way...
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Post by assisi on Jan 2, 2019 15:08:17 GMT
"The Liberal premise is Rousseau's notion that man is born free yet is everywhere in chains. That the problems of the world is that the institutions are wrong. Nothing in human nature could cause us to be unhappy - the fact is that we have the wrong institutions. The Conservative premise is that man is flawed from day one and there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs and whatever you do to deal with one of man's flaws it creates another problem. You try to get the best trade-off you can get and that's all you can hope for." Thomas Sowell, American economist and political commentator. 4 minute video where he says this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHdhrNhh88The funny thing is, although many liberals do take this Rousseauian optimistic view in theory, in practice they have an incredibly bleak view of human nature-- everybody is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. etc. Doubtless they think our institutions have made us that way... I think they like the idea that other people are racist, sexist etc., but not themselves and their fellow travellers. And, as you suggest, it is Christianity, the patriarchy and nationalism that they perceive as amongst the institutions that must be replaced. However it seems to escape their rational faculties that the closer they get to their objectives the more fragmented, divided and unhappy society becomes. Until the point where the practical delivery of the liberal ideal ends up having to censor and imprison people, and finally ends with tyranny.
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Post by assisi on Oct 30, 2019 13:56:03 GMT
“It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods."
From Whittaker Chambers, a former communist spy in America who turned conservative.
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