Skyagusta

“Must the howling Demos devour everything gentle in the land, and reduce us all to the common level of the pot-house politician, and compel us to use his slang? Radicalism seemed to be now, just what it had been in the great French Revolution, a sort of mad-dog virus; every one who was inoculated with it, becoming rabid.”
― Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat: During the War Between the States

“Liberty is always destroyed by the multitude, in the name of liberty.”
― Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat: During the War Between the States

“Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to “identification with the devil,” the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience – is adoption of “God’s place” by “reason” – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.”
― G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World