Let Books Be Your Friends

By |2020-06-17T12:14:51-05:00August 29th, 2013|Categories: Books, Quotation, Winston Churchill|

“What shall I do with all my books?” was the question; and the answer, “Read them,” sobered the questioner. But, if you cannot read them, at any rate handle and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. [...]

Admirable Work: Reading Books of Quotations

By |2020-06-17T13:57:47-05:00August 5th, 2013|Categories: Quotation, Winston Churchill|

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.—Winston S. Churchill The Imaginative Conservative applies [...]

Word and Anti-Word: A Christian Humanist Meditation

By |2019-12-05T11:37:26-06:00July 22nd, 2013|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Quotation|

At the beginning of his 1956 book, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, Dr. Kirk wrote: I hope that beyond our dreams of avarice there may lie not merely an Age of Gluttony, but a time of repentance and reform, devoted to restoring the dignity of man. I hope that some of us may continue, with [...]

We Live by Myth

By |2018-10-16T20:24:52-05:00June 4th, 2013|Categories: Imagination, Myth, Quotation, RAK, Russell Kirk|

All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided. [...]

Will the Future Be Superficial?

By |2018-08-31T14:28:03-05:00May 25th, 2013|Categories: Conservatism, Irving Babbitt, Quotation|

Irving Babbitt According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially with the re­lations between capital and labor. In that case, one is tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied with any degree of thorough­ness, [...]

Meddling with What We Do Not Understand

By |2019-06-04T16:02:16-05:00May 24th, 2013|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Permanent Things, Quotation|

What has been said of the Roman empire, is at least as true of the British constitution—“Octingentorum annorum fortuna, disciplinaque, compages haec coaluit; quae convelli sine convellentium exitio non potest. ”1 This British constitution has not been struck out at an heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the assembly of pettifoggers run mad [...]

On Wing to Beauty, Wisdom & Goodness

By |2021-04-13T11:13:17-05:00May 7th, 2013|Categories: Classics, Plato, Quotation, Wisdom|

The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul [...]

The Permanent Things

By |2018-10-16T20:24:53-05:00February 9th, 2013|Categories: Permanent Things, Quotation, RAK, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|

T.S. Eliot By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the [...]

The Tendency of all Governments

By |2016-11-26T09:52:11-06:00January 30th, 2013|Categories: Politics, Quotation, Thomas Jefferson|

And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. [...]

What is the Object of Human Life?

By |2018-10-16T20:24:55-05:00January 29th, 2013|Categories: Conservatism, Quotation, RAK, Russell Kirk, W. Winston Elliott III|

Russell Kirk In the paragraphs below, from A Program for Conservatives, Dr. Russell Kirk addresses conservatives with words which remind us of our pilgrim status in this world of tears. We are not called to material success. We are called to obedience. We are called to love. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful will find their true [...]

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