Joshua

“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth. The conclusion--which Hume already saw and from which he fled into the comfort of "common sense" and conventional life, and which the multitudes sense today without possessing any such secure refuge--the conclusion of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end. The scientist admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth, but for the technological applications of a knowledge which has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other, irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected to find in truth. The despotism of science over practical life is contemporaneous with the advent of a whole series of pseudo-religious "revelations"; the two are correlative symptoms of the same malady: the abandonment of truth.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

“Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"
-after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872”
― Otto von Bismarck

“The Liberal still speaks, at least on formal occasions, of “eternal verities,” of “faith,” of “human dignity,” of man’s “high calling” or his “unquenchable spirit,” even of “Christian civilization”; but it is quite clear that these words no longer mean what they once meant. No Liberal takes them with entire seriousness; they are in fact metaphors, ornaments of language that are meant to evoke an emotional, not an intellectual, response—a response largely conditioned by long usage, with the attendant memory of a time when such words actually had a positive and serious meaning.”
― Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age