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

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

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

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.

If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.

Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

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

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .

Just above our terror, the stars painted this storyin perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too oftenabused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.

Don't say anything. Just act cool, " I whispered.Mavkel started to shiver."Like this?" it asked."No, I mean act calm."Mavkel stopped shivering.

Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.

deprived of magic, wonder wanes

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

I am just the classic person who wants to learn stuff. I want good tutors, and with Kurt I had the best.

I think it takes a larger nature to receive nobly than to give nobly.

The republican party is my vehicle, not my master.

I now attend non-orthodox synagogues, and study little during the secular week.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.