Most of us are not really so arrogant as to think we have a right to remold the world in our image. The best we can do, toward redeeming the states o… - Russell Kirk

Embracing his knees, she babbled of the Holy Blood, and thanked all her saints. "Lei, lei, a miracle! A miracle!"
"if so, one quite arbitrary," the Knight observed. "How very odd of God! Yet conceivably, Melchiora, there exist greater sinners whom the world mistakes for the elect. Were it not for that chance, and were I indeed particularly blessed, one would be tempted to embrace the error of Origen — though not, my darling, Origen's peculiar mode of renouncing the world."

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 simply a reflection of the present

Having thus disposed in his merciless way of an incautious adversary, Randolph proceeded to expose the follies of seeking abstract harmony in government, of expecting the great venerable Gothic edifice of society to conform to ideal classical proportions; with Burke, he believed that a state is better governed by the irregular patterns formed by common sense and tradition than by the laws of mathematics and the Procrustean methods of omnipotent majorities.