“People say to me often enough:  if you want to make your art succeed and flourish, you must make it the fashion:  a phrase which I confess annoys me; for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that they care very much for what they really do not care in the least, so that it may happen according to the proverb:  Bell-wether took the leap, and we all went over …”  

“You whose hands make those things that should be works of art, you must be all artists, and good artists too, before the public at large can take real interest in such things; and when you have become so, I promise you that you shall lead the fashion; fashion shall follow your hands obediently enough.”

— William Morris, “The Lesser Arts.”

“To dream of the impossible and disregard reality is to question the inevitability of existing circumstances.”

 — from Clive Wilmer’s Introduction to News from Nowhere and Other Writings, by William Morris

“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?  Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?  The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”

“Politics and its offspring (nationalism, for example) have become the cornerstone of what is good or represents progress.  Political concerns are thought to be inherently excellent.  Man’s progress in today’s society consists in his participation in political affairs.  How many articles and declarations have we not read on that subject!  For example, women finally become human beings because they receive ‘political rights.’  To say that woman, mother of the family, exerting a profound effect on the development of her children, was the true creatress in the long run, the true force from which all politics originated, is now just reactionary talk.  A person without the right (in reality magical) to place a paper ballot in a box is nothing, not even a person.”

          — Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion      

“Is there not this strife between wealth and virtue; they always incline in opposite ways in the scales of the balance?”

— Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 550

“Were there a city of good men, it is probable that men would contend to escape office as they now contend to gain it.”

— Plato, Republic, Book I, 347

“But how can we believe that in a civilization entirely oriented toward the pursuit of comfort and the raising of the material living standard, intent on mobilizing all its powers toward that end while increasingly integrating the individual by systematic means — how can we believe that in such a civilization the state would take the chance of of making concessions to spiritual autonomy?”

  — Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion

Man is a creature; all his happiness consists in being a creature; or, as the Great Voice commanded us, in becoming a child.  All his fun is in having a gift or present; which the child, with profound understanding, values because it is ‘a surprise.’  But surprise implies that the thing came from outside ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from someone other than ourselves.  It is thrust through the letter-box; it is thrown in at the window; it is thrown over the wall …

     — G. K. Chesterton, “The Crime of Gabriel Gale,” in The Poet and the Lunatics  

How wise You were to decline the Devil’s offer of the kingdoms of the earth – as he proudly explained – in his gift alone! The offer, as You well understood, was fraudulent; there are no kingdoms – only script-writers, make-up girls, a wardrobe mistress, a stage manager. As for that other kingdom, Yours – it alone is real. The Cross is real wood, the nails are real iron, the vinegar truly tastes bitter, and the cry of desolation is live, not recorded.

—   Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered

“It is accepted that since the eighteenth century the individual’s participation in political affairs has increased.  But while this is generally admitted (before the eighteenth century there was little such participation in the West), the corollary is generally omitted:  except on rare occasions, political affairs in and by themselves, and in the eyes of man, formerly had little importance.

“In view of the fact that we judge everything in relation to political affairs, this seems unbelievable.  How can we admit that in those past centuries political affairs were not a subject of interest, of passion — that lack of public participation was much less the result of the autocratic character of the prevailing regimes than of great indifference on the part of the public itself?  Nevertheless, it seems that for centuries political affairs, except for rare moments, produced little activity, were the care of specialists in a specialized domain, or a princes’ game that affected a very limited number of individuals.”

     — Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion   

Because he is riveted to the news, the citizen rejects the truly fundamental problems, remaining attached exclusively to perfectly outmoded and useless terms and images, such as “Right” and “Left,” “capitalism” and “communism,” and really believes that the fundamental political problems are located …

The man who lives in the news … is a man without memory.  Experimentally this can be verified a thousand times over.  The news that excited his passion and agitated the deepest corners of his soul simply disappears.  He is ready for some other agitation, and what excited him yesterday does not stay with him.  This means that the man living in the news no longer has freedom, no longer has the capacity of foresight, no longer has any reference to truth.

      — Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion  

Civilization is a stream with banks.  The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry.

The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.  Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

                                            —   Will Durant

Oh, the unmitigated curse of controversy! Oh, the detestable passions that corrections and contradictions kindle up to fury in the proud heart of man! Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you. Rather let the truth of God suffer than that love suffer. You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist.

    —  Alexander Whyte, Exposition of Job (quoted in David McCasland’s Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God)  

“Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it.  Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body.  Someone was there and, the next moment, no one …

“How much more varied in operation, how much more stunning in effect, is that other sort of force, that which does not kill, or rather does not kill just yet …  From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power, in its way more monstrous, that of making a still living being into a thing …

“As pitilessly as force annihilates, equally without pity it intoxicates those who possess or believe they possess it.  In reality, no one possesses it.”

     — Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force 

Let the governments have possession of the school, the church, the press, billions of rubles, and millions of disciplined men turned into machines. All that apparently terrible organization of rude force is nothing in comparison with recognition of the truth, which arises in the heart of one man who knows its force and is communicated by this man to another, just as an endless number of candles are lighted from one. The light need only burn, and this seemingly powerful organization will waste away like wax before the fire.

— Leo Tolstoy, “Christianity and Patriotism”

Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night. It is already morning.

—  Hilaire Belloc; quoted in G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy