Irving Babbitt

Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man's ordinary will to a higher will. There is an …

When the element of conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life, what remains is the irresponsible quest for thrills.

Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma.

To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image.

What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need …

When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians.

True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard.

Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional nationalist; and that is because he saw that patriotic 'virtue' is a more potent intoxicant than the love of …