A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.

Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.

Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.

Life is for action, and if we desire to know anything, we must make up our minds to be ignorant about much.

...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly.