A society which denies the heart its role becomes, in very short order, a heartless society.

The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.

Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

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

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

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.