The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that . . . everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.