A government should do little for the pleasures of the people, enough for their needs, and everything for their virtues. (p.72)
Wherever there are machines to take the place of men, many men will be mere machines. The effect of machines, in sparing men, must be to diminish the population. (p.73)
Fashions change ceaselessly in a people that no longer has morals, in the broadest sense of the term. (p. 77)
A mind employed to corrupt is nothing other than force employed to destroy. (p.78)
It is difficult for a father of a family not to regard as a personal enemy the author of a bad book that brings corruption into the heart of his children. (p.79)
Today every passion that is not for money, honor, or pleasure is called unreasonable and fanatical. (p.79)
* Quoted from “Thoughts on Various Subjects (1817)” by Louis-Gabriel-Amboise de Bonald (1754–1840), a selection from Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition, edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2003
