All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

That meddling in other people's affairs...formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention.

The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.

You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.

A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.