Quotes About Values

This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be "salt and light" to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

I began to wonder what, exactly, mainstream conservatism was conserving. It dawned on me that some of the causes championed by my fellow conservatives—chiefly an uncritical enthusiasm for the market—can in some circumstances undermine the thing that I, as a traditionalist, considered the most important institution to conserve: the family.

Sex and commerce are fine things, but man cannot live by Viagra and the Dow Jones alone. A life led collecting things and experiences in pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad life, but it's not a good life either. Too often, the Democrats act like the Party of Lust, and the Republicans the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins that eat at the soul.

Contemporary philosopher John Gray says that there is much less distance between liberal democrats and Marxists than we like to think: "Technology—the practical application of scientific knowledge—produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact."6

Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power but, character, health, knowledge and good judgement will always be in demand under all conditions.

comprobamos que el desarrollo capitalista no conlleva necesariamente -como se creía y como todavía algunos creen- un empobrecimiento material de la población, pero en cambio sí abre nuevos espacios que contribuyen al empobrecimiento cultural y espiritual de la sociedad.

las grandes amenazas -del empobrecimiento cultural- no provienen de la circulación global de mercancías, ideas, valores y símbolos culturales, sino de otro proceso que acompaña la globalización, como su sombra: el fortalecimiento de poderes locales que, en muchos casos, recuperan tradiciones culturales provincianas imbuidas de costumbres religiosas y fanatismos étnicos, intereses caciquiles o corporativos.

No liquid investment alternatives with stable guaranteed principal values exist that can provide real returns by consistently beating the combined impact of inflation and income taxes.

That is, we will repeatedly suggest that as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline.

Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture's dignity, its attitude toward its animating values.)

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic. —G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

a meaningful politics must recognize other important values in human life. Indeed, politics makes no sense when it stands by itself. If the question who wields political power is not broadened to take account of what that power is to be used for-that is, what human values it will serve-then it reduces to a matter of who manages to subdue whom.*

I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ....

They do not leave home without American Express. ... Blame the moral carelessness that parents pass off as the gift of freedom as they cut their children loose like colorful kites and wish them an exciting flight.

Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.

You can't wake up one day and say 'I'm for gay marriage ' and wake up the next day and say 'I'm against it.' Wake up one day and say, 'I'm pro-choice ' and the next day wake up and say, 'I'm pro-life.' There's no credibility there.

Futurists and common sense concur that a substantial change, worldwide, in life-style and moral guidelines will soon become an absolute necessity.

Nobody steals books but your friends.

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

Even if we don't know it or aren't aware of it, politics and philosophy are really what make our up lives.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

if the person did not have anxiety, he or she would also not have freedom. Anxiety demonstrates that values, no matter how beclouded, do exist in the person. Without values there would be only barren despair.

Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.