Jonathan Watson

“I never understood how galling it was. Some smug bastard with a ledger comes into town, makes you pay for the privilege of owning something.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society. But in hard fact no social group will long survive the disappearance of its chief reasons for being, and these reasons are not, primarily, biological but institutional. Unless new institutional functions are performed by a group—family, trade union, or church—its psychological influence will become minimal.”
― Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom

“Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Behind the commandment lay also a care for the slayer—the slayer also exposed his soul to many kinds of evil powers, which now found occasion for sudden assaults.”
― Sigrid Undset, The Snake Pit