Conservatives

"Modernity proclaims rights without in any way providing the means to exercise them."

"A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons."

"In reality, as their theological roots demonstrate, human rights are only law contaminated by morality."

"Maurras, like Bannon, was a Catholic nationalist, and he argued in the early 1900s that the Enlightenment had elevated the individual over the nation. (One person who knows Bannon said he has spoken of the coming end of the Enlightenment.) To Maurras, a hero of the modern French right wing, the French Revolution ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity" were a liberal cosmopolitan corruption of France's authentic identity. Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras' distinction between the "legal country," led by elected officials, and the "real country" of ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway. Maurras even warned about the nefarious influence of Islam in Europe."

"In fact Yahweh is none other than the God who says “enough.” The Law he issues is meant as limitation. The Covenant he concludes symbolically seals this castration."

"There can be no social peace in the Republic, and social reform is impossible without the king."

"Passion for equality blinds the utopian to the fact that society, as a whole, is based on inequality of men in two respects: the inventor, the innovator, the exceptional man creates something new and insures continuous progress; the others emulate his work or merely improve their own lot by benefiting from his creativity."

"Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent."

"The opposite concept of the Latin religio should be sought in the Latin verb negligere. To be religious is synonymous with responsibility, not neglect. To be responsible is to be free — to possess the concrete means of exercising free action. At the same time, to be free is also to be connected to others by a common spirituality."

"In fact, it is not a question of going back to the past, but of connecting with it — and also, by that very fact, in a spherical conception of history, to connect to the eternal and cause it to surge back, to have consonance in life, and to disentangle itself from the tyranny of the logos, the terrible tyranny of the Law, so as to reestablish the school of the mythos and life."

""One can have a society without God,” writes Régis Debray, “but there cannot be a society without religion.” He adds, “Those nations on the way to disbelief are on the path to abdication.” One can also cite Georges Bataille, according to whom, “religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, boils down to a clearly conscious effort to become entirely self-conscious.”"

"Paganism sacralizes and thereby exalts this world whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies and thereby retreats from this world. Paganism is based on the idea of the sacred."

"In paganism, on the contrary, good cannot be separated from beauty, and this is normal, because the good is form, the consummate forms of worldly things. Consequently, art cannot be separated from religion. Art is sacred. Not only can the gods be represented, but art is how they can be represented, and insofar as men perpetually assure them of representation, they have a full status of existence. All European spirituality is based on representation as mediation between the visible and the invisible, on representation by means of depicted figures and signs exchanged against a meaning intimately tied to the real, the very guarantee of this incessant and mutual conversion of the sign and meaning. Beauty is the visible sign of what is good, ugliness the visible sign of not only what is deformed or spoiled but bad."

"The promotion of ‘average’ individual causes a general levelling down."

"Contrary to what is all too often claimed, voters do not wish the men they have elected to be in their image. Voters love greatness and are capable of recognizing it. They love courage, even when they personally lack it."

"Far from being ‘an effective counter-force to the fanatics’, apathy plays in their favour: for under these conditions, ‘fanatics’ may easily be the only ones capable of mobilising public opinion. The prevalence of greyness brings out colours — whatever they may be. When political life is in decline, violence and terrorism appear as the only means of striking an anaesthetised public opinion with no power over legal procedures. Apathy is a real gift to extremism."

"Universalism is a corruption of objectivity. Whereas objectivity is achieved from particular things, universalism claims to define particularity from an abstract notion posed arbitrarily."

"When one speaks of a ‘human right’, does one mean that this right possesses an intrinsic value, an absolute value or an instrumental value? That it is of such importance that its realisation should take precedence over all other considerations, or that it just counts among the things that are indispensable? That it gives a power or a privilege? That it permits an immunity or that it confers an immunity?"

"When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude toward life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honor, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honorable vs. dishonorable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth, replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on. However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature in my opinion is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism."

"The primitive religion, whose symbols were the immovable stone of the hearth, and the ancestral tomb, — a religion which had established the ancient family, and had afterwards organized the city, —changed with time, and grew old. ...Men began to have an idea of immaterial nature; the notion of the human soul became more definite, and almost at the same time that of a divine intelligence sprang up in their minds. Could they still believe in the divinities of the primitive ages, of those dead men who lived in the tomb, of those Lares who had been men, of those holy ancestors whom it was necessary to continue to nourish with food? Such a faith became impossible. ...Some believed in annihilation, others in a second and entirely spiritual existence in a world of spirits. In these cases they no longer admitted that the dead lived in the tomb, supporting themselves upon offerings. They also began to have too high an idea of the divine to persist in believing that the dead were gods. On the contrary, they imagined the soul going to seek its recompense in the Elysian Fields, or going to pay the penalty of its crimes; and by a notable progress, they no longer deified any among men... [T]he Lares and Heroes [had] lost the adoration of all who thought. As to the sacred fire, which appears to have had no significance, except so far as it was connected with the worship of the dead, that also lost its prestige. Men continued to have a domestic fire in the house, to salute it, to adore it, and to offer it libations; but this was now only a customary worship, which faith no longer vivified. [Analogously], [t]he public hearth of the city, or prytaneum, ...they had forgotten...[,] represented the invisible life of the national ancestors, founders, and heroes. ...At the same time a few great sanctuaries, like those of Delphi and Delos, attracted men, and made them forget their local worship. The mysteries and the doctrines which these taught accustomed them to disdain the empty and meaningless religion of the city. ... Then philosophy appeared, and [finally] overthrew all the rules of the ancient polity."

"When this poor class, after several civil wars, saw that victories gained them nothing, that the opposite party always returned to power, and that, after many interchanges of confiscations and restitutions the struggle always recommenced, they dreamed of establishing a monarchical government which should conform to their interests, and which, by forever suppressing the opposite party, should assure them, for the future, the fruits of their victory. And so they set up tyrants. From that moment the parties changed names; they were no longer aristocracy or democracy; they fought for liberty or for tyranny. Under these two names wealth and poverty were still at war. Liberty signified the government where the rich had the rule, and defended their fortunes; tyranny indicated exactly the contrary. It is a general fact, and almost without exception in the history of Greece and of Italy, that the tyrants sprang from the popular party, and had the aristocracy as enemies. “The mission of the tyrant,” says Aristotle, “is to protect the people against the rich; he has always commenced by being a demagogue, and it is the essence of tyranny to oppose the aristocracy.” “The means of arriving at a tyranny,” he also says, “is to gain the confidence of the multitude, and one does this by declaring himself the enemy of the rich. This was the course of Peisistratus at Athens, of Theagenes at Megara, and of Dionysius at Syracuse.” The tyrant always made war upon the rich. At Megara, Theagenes surprises the herds of the rich in the country and slaughters them. At Comae, Aristodemus abolishes debts, and takes the lands of the rich to give them to the poor. ...They could maintain their power only while they satisfied the cravings of the multitude, and administered to their passions."

"This right of citizenship then became precious, first, because it was complete, and secondly, because it was a privilege. Through it a man figured in the comitia of the most powerful city of Italy; he might be consul and commander of the legions. There was also the means of satisfying more modest ambitions; thanks to this right, one might ally himself, by marriage, to a Roman family; or he might take up his abode at Rome, and become a proprietor there; or he might carry on trade in Rome, which had already become one of the first commercial towns in the world. One might enter the company of farmers of the revenue, —that is to say, take a part in the enormous profits which accrued from the collection of the revenue, or from speculations in the lauds of the ager publicus. Wherever one lived, he was effectually protected; he escaped the authority of the municipal magistrate and was sheltered from the caprices of the Roman magistrates themselves. By being a citizen of Rome, a man gained honor, wealth, and security. The Latins, therefore, became eager to obtain this title, and used all sorts of means to acquire it."

"The upper classes among the ancients never had intelligence or ability enough to direct the poor towards labor, and thus help them to escape honorably from their misery and corruption. A few benevolent men attempted it, but they did not succeed. The result was that the cities always floated between two revolutions, one to despoil the rich, the other to enable them to recover their fortunes. This lasted from the Peloponnesian war to the conquest of Greece by the Romans."

"To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every revolutionary project."

"In every city the rich and the poor were two enemies living by the side of each other, the one coveting wealth, and the other seeing their wealth coveted. 'No relation, no service, no labor united them. The poor could acquire wealth only by despoiling the rich. The lich could defend their property only by extreme skill or by force. They regarded each other with the eyes of hate. There was a double conspiracy in every city the poor conspired from cupidity, the rich from fear. Aristotle says the rich took the following oath among themselves: "I swear always to remain the enemy of the people, and to do them all the injury in my power." It is impossible to say which of the two parties committed the most cruelties and crimes. Hati-ed effaced in their hearts every sentiment of humanity. There was at Miletus a war between the rich and the poor. At first the latter were successful, and drove the rich from the city; but afterwards, regretting that they had not been able to slaughter them, they took their children, collected them into some threshing-floors, and had them trodden to death under the feet of oxen. The rich afterwards returned to the city, and became masters of it. They took, in their turn, the children of the poor, covered them with pitch, and burnt them alive. What, then, became of the democracy? They were not precisely responsible for these excesses and crimes; still they were the first to be affected by them. There were no longer any governing rules; now, the democracy could live only under the strictest and best onserved rules. We no longer see any government, but merely factions in power. The magistrate no longer exercised his integrity for the benefit of peace and law, but for the interests and greed of a party. A command no longer had a legitimate title or a sacred character; there was no longer anything voluntary in obedience; always forced, it was always waiting for an opportunity to take its revenge."

"We do not see that all Greece, or even a Greek city, formally asked for this right of citizenship, so much desired; but men worked individually to acquire it, and Rome bestowed it with a good grace.' Some obtained it through the favor of the emperor; others bought it. It was granted to those who had three children, or who served in certain divisions of the army. An easy and prompt means of acquiring it was to sell one's self as a slave to a Roman citizen, for the act of freeing him according to legal forms conferred the right of citizenship. One who had the title of Roman citizen no longer formed a part of his native city, either civilly or politically. He could continue to live there, but he was considered an alien, he was no longer subject to the laws of the city, he no longer obeyed its magistrates, no longer supported its pecuniary burdens. This was a consequence of the old principle, which did not permit a man to belong to two cities at the same time."

"No man can have a double identity."

"Based on the balancing act of the golden mean, bourgeois marriage mixed moderate but continuing sexual attraction, a mutual social and economic interest in living together, respect for the wife, a will to create a lineage, significant socio-cultural similarity, hypocrisy for dissimulating and managing adulterous liaisons (hence the importance of legal prostitution), and the building up of a patrimony to be transmitted. When the couple gets old, this leads to a habitual tenderness much stronger than the passionate and ephemeral simulation of today’s young couples."

"Throughout history, any general lack of firmness and virility has acted as a magnet for aggression and invasions, particularly when it comes to peoples who, for ethno-cultural reasons, respect the language of force and despise that of commiseration above all else."

"The principle purpose of marriage is perverted as soon as one assigns ‘love’ as its ultimate end. Reasoning in an Aristotelian manner, one could say that love and sex are a component of marriage but not at all its necessary telos. Sex and love are means that have been inappropriately transformed into ends. The principle telos of marriage is the construction of a lineage by means of procreation, and not simply the union of two beings who ‘love and desire each other’, even if romantic desire may have its place. A lasting couple that forms a family, the building block of a nation, is not based on ‘love’ in the adolescent sense, nor on a passing sex fantasy, but on a partnership which evolves with time, based on ethnic, cultural and social commonality; on shared values and a family strategy."

"What we strive to restore and re-animate will never come from the promises of the middle-class politicians, but will come instead from the spirit of the last Delphic prophecy, which foresaw that, ‘One day Apollo will return and it will be forever’."

"Of course, they practice a purely socioeconomic adhesion to European civilisation, since the latter offers them so many advantages, but would not give up their ethnic identity and their loyalty to the motherland for anything in the world."

"Speaking of his own country, Konstantinos Stephanidis, Member of the Greek Parliament, had this to say in May 1999: Today, we all realise that, as a result of its limited demographic growth, Greece is doomed to become a small twenty-first-century country comprised of a majority of old and rich people, a country surrounded by an ocean of poverty-stricken youths. In 10 years’ time, the Greek population will most probably still be stagnating at 10 million people that enjoy a Western standard of living, but the Turks will have reached a total of 80 million by then. In other words, we are talking about the presence of 10 million affluent individuals surrounded by 100 million poor ones, almost all of them Muslim. Therein is the real problem that Greece faces today. What is true of Greece also applies to the whole of Europe, but on an even larger scale. Not only are we being invaded from the inside, but are also surrounded by young and prolific countries which covet what we have."

"The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here."

"Saint-Étienne concludes, ‘I urgently call for the creation of a parliamentary commission to establish the “balance sheet of skills” of immigration. . . . If this phenomenon were to continue for five or ten years, France would soon become the only major industrialised country “on the path to underdevelopment.”’ He concludes, ‘Refusing to look facts in the face will bring the country to suicide."

"Uncontrolled immigration from abroad, which is composed of welfare recipients (many more ‘refugees’ and illegal immigrants than workers) and not of wealth creators who pay for benefits, constitutes a tidal wave that will not be sustainable in the middle term. The ‘integration’ or ‘assimilation’ in which we pretend to believe cannot work because the populations to be integrated and assimilated are too numerous and there is no control over the human deluge. Europe is in the process of undergoing — without the consent of its indigenous peoples — a massive substitution of populations, which is taking place for the first time in its history. The new populations that are settling here are importing a ‘Third World culture’, that is, they are impoverishing Europe. It is politically incorrect to mention these facts, but we must talk about them all the same."

"A prosperous economy rests on a high level of research and investment in order to preserve the environment, develop tourism and state of the art industries, maintain the national patrimony, transmit its cultural traditions and identity, innovate, and so on. Especially in France, the trend is quite the opposite."

"The international press does not discuss the issue — it is taboo — but, since the end of apartheid and the establishment of a Black government, South Africa is slowly sinking into barbarism. The first to suffer from it are, of course, the Blacks themselves. Some of them (as happened in Rhodesia, Algeria and elsewhere) are beginning to miss ‘White power’ . . . Unemployment has tripled since the abolition of apartheid and crime rates are today the highest in the world: 12,000 murders and 50,000 rapes a year. 95 per cent of the victims are Black. Heavily guarded by militias, the wealthy Whites live in the cities, surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences. The situation is paradoxical but explicable. Since the inauguration of Black power the difference in the standard of living between Blacks and Whites has increased by 10 per cent to the advantage of the Whites and de facto apartheid has become much more marked than under the old de jure apartheid."

"The strategy must be first to contain and then to repel Islam everywhere where it expands outside its historic territory."

"1) First of all, demographic decline. No one seems to be concerned with this fundamental fact. The burden of older people and the lack of young people are automatically going to produce the following phenomena, which are already beginning but are only going to speed up: the impossibility of paying for retirements and social benefits, the brain drain, and a shortage of creators and innovators. Taxes and burdens, like public debt, will keep on growing all the way to a breakdown. The policies of the European states are not taking these facts into account. Bankruptcy looms. Countries whose population is ageing and declining can no longer be sure of a minimal level of innovation."

"It is absolutely fascinating to see how far educated, intelligent, self-proclaimed feminist women end up submitting to the authority of psychotic and mediocre men. It is as if these highly evolved women struggled intellectually with machismo but, in their daily life, end up submitting to a man. Women who have been beaten, even raped, forgive their attackers. One must ask whether they do not love them because of their brutality."

"This colonisation of the North by the South appears as a soft colonialism, without legal permission, relying on appeals to pity, asylum and equality. It is the ‘fox’s strategy’ (as opposed to the lion’s) noted by Machiavelli.[230] In reality, however, the coloniser, who justifies himself with the ‘modern’ Western ideology of his victim, whose values he pretends to adopt, does not share those values at all. He is anti-egalitarian, domineering (while claiming to be oppressed and persecuted), aiming at revenge and conquest. This is the clever ruse of a way of thinking that has remained archaic. To counter it, will it not be necessary to become mentally archaic again and rid ourselves of the demoralising handicap of ‘modern’ humanism?"

"We are victims of the psychological condition of derealisation, a loss of the sense of reality of what is happening. Our contemporaries have persuaded themselves that ‘catastrophe cannot happen’ and that this civilisation is at the same time eternal and continually getting better and better, that it will never experience a reversal, and a fortiori not a collapse. Not only is this a possibility, but it will happen, and very soon."

"The French want both a welfare state and a society with a short workweek. But where does the manna of this state come from, in socialist reality? From income"

"The second solution is communitarianism, also baptised assimilation. It is a question of a compromise, inspired by the United States and rather unclear theories of intellectual ‘ethnopluralism’, Right-wing and Left-wing. People born abroad keep their ‘culture’, but adhere to a common ‘minimum’, a global Social Contract. Society becomes a pacific kaleidoscope, united by a soft and pacifying deus ex machina. This utopian vision, Rousseauian and adolescent, still defended by learned old fogies, who flirt just a little with apartheid (whence its partisans on the extreme Right) has been tried by all the European states. The result has been total failure. There has been no ‘assimilation’ of ‘ethnic communities’ cohabiting peacefully. On the contrary, ethnic civil war is just around the corner."

"In ten, twenty, or thirty years, they will be increasingly encumbered with immigrant-colonists from the Third World, increasingly Africanised and Islamicised, prey to increasingly serious problems of security and maintaining law and order. Their native-born will be increasingly older; their educated young people will be fleeing their own countries en masse, while the need to provide subvention for the unproductive will be increasingly severe. There is surely no hope at all! And because of the ‘snowball effect’ the collapse may well occur suddenly, even by the middle of this decade."

"All respected economists know that long periods of prosperity have never been assured by markets, but by political leaders who guarantee a high-quality education, spur a dynamic demography through pro-natal policies, encourage investments by great national programs, keep taxes low, limit imports, assure a free and transparent domestic market, support national entrepreneurs, develop research and strictly control immigration."

"The demographic ageing of Europe and other leading industrial countries is multiplied by the economic burden of immigration. For the time being, we can still hold out, but this will not last. The lack of active workers, the burden of retirees and the expenses of healthcare will end, from 2005-2010, with burdening European economies with debt. Gains in productivity and technological advances (the famous ‘primitive accumulation of fixed capital’, the economists’ magic cure) will never be able to match the external demographic costs. Lastly, far from compensating for the losses of the working-age native-born population, the colonising immigration Europe is experiencing involves first of all welfare recipients and unskilled workers. In addition, this immigration represents a growing expense (insecurity, the criminal economy, urban policies, etc.). An economic collapse of Europe, the world’s leading commercial power, would drag down with it the United States and the entire Western economy."

"Online’ sales on the Internet are only an improvement of the old mail order catalogues, which were introduced in . . . 1850; they do not represent a structural change. Similarly, the Internet, multimedia cell phones, cable television, smartcards and the general computerisation of society — even genetic engineering — do not represent structural changes. They are all only developments of what already existed. There is nothing in all this to compare with inventions that really turned the world upside down, the real techno-economic metamorphoses introduced between 1860 and 1960 that revolutionised society and the framework of life: internal combustion engines, electricity, the telephone, telegraph, radio (which was more revolutionary than television), trains, cars, airplanes, penicillin, antibiotics, and so forth. The ‘new economy’ is behind us! No fundamental innovation has taken place since 1960. Computers only allow us to accomplish differently, faster and more cheaply (but with much greater fragility) what was already being done. On the other hand, the automobile, antibiotics, telecommunications and air travel were authentic revolutions that made possible what before had been impossible."

"We fight for a vision of the world that is both traditional and Faustian, that allies enrootment and disinstallation, the citizen’s freedom and imperial service to the community-as-a-people, passionate creativity and critical reason, an unshakeable loyalty and an adventurous curiosity (WWF 267)"