“Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience.”

Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.

Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves.

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.

For Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny’s incubation.

Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.

But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power.

The purpose of fasting is to loosen to some degree the ties which bind us to the world of material things and our surroundings as a whole, in order that we may concentrate all our spiritual powers upon the unseen and eternal things.

The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

A good soldier has his heart and soul in it. When he receives an order, he gets a hard on, and when he drives his lance through his enemy’s guts, he comes.

I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

We’re telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

Take hold of your life and order yourself to be valiant.

When you embrace the mystery and open yourself to it, a new life is created, resistant to the old problems.