Quote #151: man as a social animal

"And indeed nature, or rather God Who is the author of nature, wills that man should live in a civil society; and this clearly shown both by the faculty of language, the greatest medium of intercourse, and by numerous innate desires of the mind, and the many necessary things, and things of great importance, which men isolated cannot procure, but which they can procure when joined and associated with others."

- Pope Leo XIII, Diuturnum (On Civil Government) (1881).

Quote #146: true and false equality

"The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation." 


- Russell Kirk (1918-1994), American writer and conservative theorist.

Quote #143: nostalgia is not substitute for tradition

"A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today."

- Christopher Lasch (1932-1994), American social critic.

Quote #139: Enduring freedom is embodied freedom

"The only freedom which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in space, sanctioned by a genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment.  The only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery.  It is a lesson which Western man is only now beginning to learn."

- M.E. Bradford, A Better Guide Than Reason: Federalists & Anti-Federalists (Transaction Publishers: 1994), pg. xviii.

[Cross-posted at my own blog, Ordered Liberty.]