We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is… - Russell Kirk

Počnite osvjetljavanjem kutka u kojem se nalazite - poboljšavanjem jedne ljudske jedinke, sebe, i pomaganjem svojem bližnjemu. Ne morate biti bogati ili slavni kako biste sudjelovali u iskupljenju vremena: za taj zadatak potrebni su vam samo moralna mašta i pravi razum. Vjerojatno nećete biti nagrađeni bogatstvom ili slavom, nego vječnim trenucima: onim pojavama u vlastitom postojanju kada se, kako T. S. Eliot kaže, vrijeme i bezvremenost presijecaju... Sve ovo stvaranje oko nas je vrt je namijenjen nama pogrešivim ljudima da se o njemu brinemo. Ako možete, posadite cvijeće ili stabla u njemu i iščupajte korov.

By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.

When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe — although to a lesser extent — they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.