Eric

“When most people use the word ‘freedom’ nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age—and there are such ages—which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom. There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of ‘natural rights’ depends upon the premise of an on alterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of the divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and the clever, the dominant majority or the successful oligarch, should respect the liberties of anyone else. Freedom without the theory of natural rights becomes simply the freedom of those who hold power to do as they like with the lives of those whose interests conflict with theirs.”
― Russell Kirk

“They tried to substitute for Christianity a body of dogmas called “dialectical materialism.” As Orestes Brownson pointed out in 1849, and as Arnold Toynbee has also written, communism was really a kind of caricature of Christianity, borrowing certain of its moral affirmations, imitating its dogmas, and even appropriating some of its phrases. This made communism all the more dangerous: for the superficial similarities between Christian morality and the pretended Soviet morality sometimes deluded Americans and people in other free states into thinking that communism had high moral aspirations.”
― Russell Kirk, The American Cause

“Our problem is how to reconcile respect for true human dignity, personality, with the demands of social cooperation. And that is a most difficult problem. Very few people really are interested in true freedom, in any era; most folk always go for security, secular conformity, and enforced routine, at the price of independence. But the freedom of the few who really deserve freedom—and they are fewer in our time than ever they were before, I am inclined to believe—is infinitely precious; and in the long run, the security and contentment of the whole of humanity depends upon the survival of that freedom for a few. The great danger just now is that, in the name of general security, we shall neglect altogether the claims of the minority who need and deserve freedom. We seem bent on establishing a universal equalitarian domination which will call itself free and democratic, but which will have made existence almost impossible for those natures that seek to obey the will of God and to abjure desire.”
― Russell Kirk

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”
― John W. Campbell Jr.