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

There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.

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

Nothing is more conservative than conservation

True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity.

Rather than ennobling the public mind and cementing the social fabric, applied science speedily became the chief weapon of a gross individualism, which was anathema to the frugal and righteous (John Quincy) Adams, the source of enormous fortunes divorced from duty, the instrument of unscrupulous ambition and rapacious materialism. Presently, it came to scar the very of the country which Adams loved, a disfiguring process uninterrupted since his day.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.