“The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child’s unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace …”
“Schools are a menace, and city life is canned.”
— Painter and Illustrator N. C. Wyeth
“I can never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?”
“No,” said Basil, loudly and cheerfully …
— G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades; “The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation.”
“I looked about me in life and in history and literature and I saw that there were two kinds of men, the defeated and the undefeated, and that surely the last was the first.”
— Mari Sandoz, author of Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas and Cheyenne Autumn.
Quoted in Bruce Nicoll, “Mari Sandoz: Nebraska Loner.” The American West 2.2 (Spring 1965): 32-36.
“I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech were kind of a little bit obvious and what we used to call ‘old hat’ … About the United States only wanting peace and freedom from all foreign entanglements. No! What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: ‘Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse.'”
— Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
(Speech by General Edgeways at the Fort Beulah Rotary Club)
“Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket,
And are counted as the small dust on the scales;
Look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing …
All nations before Him are as nothing,
And they are counted by Him less than nothing
And worthless.”
— Isaiah 40:15-17
“How infinitely preferable it is to be abhorred, rather than embraced, by those in authority. Where the distinction between God and Caesar is so abundantly clear, no one in his senses — or out of them, for that matter — is likely to suggest that any good purpose would be served by arranging a dialogue between the two of them.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling.”
— Proverbs 16:18
“… The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good. The philosophers have promised you that, and have been unable to do it. They neither know what is your true good, nor what is your true state. How could they have given remedies for your ills, when they did not even know them? Your chief maladies are pride, which takes you away from God, and lust, which binds you to earth; and they have done nothing else but cherish one or other of these diseases.”
— Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 430
“Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If any one loves the world, the love of he Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.”
— 1 John 2:15, 16
They are inclosed in their own fat:
With their mouth they speak proudly.”
— Psalm 17:10
“Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most unmistakable significance is for the governing nothing but a weapon for the attainment of aggressive and mercenary aims, and for the governed is the denial of human dignity, common sense, and conscience, and slavish subjection to those who are in authority. This is what is preached wherever patriotism is preached.
“Patriotism is slavery … ”
— Leo Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism
“We often read nowadays of the valour or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.”
— G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World
“We do not acknowledge allegiance to any human government. We recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests and rights of American citizens are not dearer to us than those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism to revenge any national insult or injury…
“We conceive that a nation has no right to defend itself against foreign enemies or to punish its invaders, and no individual possesses that right in his own case, and the unit cannot be of greater importance than the aggregate. If soldiers thronging from abroad with intent to commit rapine and destroy life may not be resisted by the people or the magistracy, then ought no resistance to be offered to domestic troublers of the public peace or of private security.
“The dogma that all the governments of the world are approvingly ordained of God, and that the powers that be in the United States, in Russia, in Turkey, are in accordance with his will, is no less absurd than impious. It makes the impartial Author of our existence unequal and tyrannical. It cannot be affirmed that the powers that be in any nation are actuated by the Spirit or guided by the example of Christ in the treatment of enemies; therefore they cannot be agreeable to the will of God, and therefore their overthrow by a spiritual regeneration of their subjects is inevitable.
“We regard as unchristian and unlawful not only all wars, whether offensive or defensive, but all preparations for war; every naval ship, every arsenal, every fortification, we regard as unchristian and unlawful; the existence of any kind of standing army, all military chieftains, all monuments commemorative of victory over a fallen foe, all trophies won in battle, all celebrations in honor of military exploits, all appropriations for defense by arms; we regard as unchristian and unlawful every edict of government requiring of its subjects military service.
“Hence we deem it unlawful to bear arms, and we cannot hold any office which imposes on its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity. It follows that we cannot sue any man at law to force him to return anything he may have wrongly taken from us; if he has seized our coat, we shall surrender him our cloak also rather than subject him to punishment.”
— William Lloyd Garrison, the great American abolitionist; an excerpt from the Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Convention, Boston, 1838. Quoted in The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy.
“As long as a noticeable or expressed tension or a conflict of action remains, propaganda cannot be said to have accomplished its aim. It must produce quasi-unanimity, and the opposing faction must become negligible, or in any case cease to be vocal.”
— Jacques Ellul, Propaganda
“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”
— Adolf Hitler, Speech to the Reichstag, January 1939
“Technology cannot put up with intuitions and ‘literature.’ It must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded—because it is not a possible end for technique—and left to the sphere of dreams.”
— Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
“The power of kings is founded on the reason and the folly of the people, but especially on their folly.”
— Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 26
“Modern man worships ‘facts’ — that is, he accepts ‘facts’ as the ultimate reality. He is convinced that what is, is good. He believes that facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be necessity, which he somehow connects with the idea of progress.”
— Jacques Ellul, Propaganda