"That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed, and hatred—this even its contemporaries could see all too well. They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be a crime. But the twentieth century has done especially much to tarnish the romantic luster of revolution which still prevailed in the eighteenth century. As half-centuries and centuries have passed, people have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people."

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“A people consists of a complex of relationships and attitudes, and as such, there is another, far greater threat to it than physical destruction or loss of independence, it is that of dissolution. If men no longer feel as members of the same body, if the climate of trust that unites them disappears, if the symbols they have in common no longer have the same meaning for them... if the moral life of the people disappears. This loss of a moral existence is not due to sudden external causes, but to internal phenomena and dissociators: byproducts of progress.”

~Bertrand de Jouvenel

“The hero can never be a relativist... The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace.[...] In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.”

~Richard M. Weaver