The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things” – the norms of human action.
~ In Enemies of the Permanent Things (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984), page 41.

Without that Resurrection, which prefigures our own resurrection and life everlasting, one might as well turn again to the gods of the Greeks, or to Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. The Resurrection is critical both to my personal faith and to the whole elaborate edifice called Christianity. It is now more rationally possible to believe in the Resurrection than it was in Saint Paul’s time.
~ Quoted in Nearer, My God by William F. Buckley, Jr. (NY: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997), page 124.

Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
~ Russell Kirk, in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 33

The Naked Ape-theory of human nature, the “reductionist” notion of man as a breathing automaton, is reinforced by ignorance of literature’s moral imagination.
~ in in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 81

All things begin and end in mystery.
~ in in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 83

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