Michael Warren Davis > Quotes

“We are always free to choose, but never free from choice. We lack the greatest freedom of all: freedom from desire, otherwise known as gratitude.”
― Michael Warren Davis, The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservative Isn't Enough

“The pursuit of happiness was at the center of the medieval worldview. They understood (as every Christian does) that we cannot be happy without God—that God is our happiness. “Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in thee,” as Saint Augustine said. There’s no better word for the condition of modern man: restless. He is oppressed by his own false freedom, tortured by his inflamed appetites, and humiliated by his own ignorance. The things that might make him truly happy—gratitude and simplicity, peace and quiet—are kept forever out of his reach.”
― Michael Warren Davis, The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservative Isn't Enough

“We cannot remake the world as twelfth-century France, but what we can do is recognize that a happy society would look much more like twelfth-century France than twenty-first-century America.”
― Michael Warren Davis, The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservative Isn't Enough

“Our political, economic, and cultural institutions were devised by men who, like Aristotle, believed that every man could be a philosopher and assumed that every man wanted to be one. The feudal order was built on the opposite assumption. The medievals assumed that most men didn’t want to be philosophers: they were content to be men.”
― Michael Warren Davis, The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservative Isn't Enough