Scott Andrews

“In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Concrete is an invention as transformative as fire or electricity. It has changed where and how billions of people live, work, and move around. Concrete is the skeleton of the modern world, the scaffold on which so much else is built. It gives us the power to dam enormous rivers, erect buildings of Olympian height, and travel to all but the remotest corners of the world with an ease that would astonish our ancestors. Measured by the number of lives it touches, concrete is easily the most important man-made material ever invented.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.4 The oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours. It is the stage-set for the first-person plural of politics, the locus, both real and imagined, where ‘it all takes place’. Virtues like thrift and self-sacrifice, the habit of offering and receiving respect, the sense of responsibility – all those aspects of the human condition that shape us as stewards and guardians of our common inheritance – arise through our growth as persons, by creating islands of value in the sea of price. To acquire these virtues we must circumscribe the ‘instrumental reasoning’ that governs the life of Homo oeconomicus. We must vest our love and desire in things to which we assign an intrinsic, rather than an instrumental, value, so that the pursuit of means can come to rest, for us, in a place of ends. That is what we mean by settlement: putting the oikos back in the oikonomia. And that is what conservatism is about.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: ‘The mother of folklore is poverty.’3”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music