"This haste is the great weakness of present-day politics. We have no time. The West in its dealings with the East is handicapped because it must produce results before the next election. We are forced to short-term projects that will mature in a single legislative session. Anything that cannot promise immediate results is by that token not worth undertaking. And with our eyes directed toward tomorrow’s results, we too often overlook how similar maneuvers in the past had no results at all, or bad ones. But this is not alone a matter of our political habits and structures; it is the symptom of something deeper. It is characteristic of a generation that has lost its sense of historical perspective and become so self-centered that it no longer sees the continuity of which it is a part. In rejecting its past, it has renounced its future, and sometimes its erratic and futile measures in the present convince one that these are the desperate activities of those who truly anticipate annihilation. The perspective of history has been lost because history gives up its meaning only in the perspective of eternity. All that can be worked toward on earth in the span of a single human life takes on meaning and value only when seen under the aspect of eternity, man’s participation in which sets the final seal on all his actions. Against the assurances that eternity holds, man discovers his own dimensions and is guarded against making the over- or under-estimation of himself that leads to destruction in the world. Those who think they have but one life to live can do little good that will outlast it. Man is distinguished from the animal by his reason, and the distinction of man’s reasoning is that it can discover and work toward goals that are beyond the brief extent of his own animal life. 
Otto Von Habsburg (1912-2011)
"The perception of this is not everywhere lost. I came upon an example of it during the Spanish Civil War. The various military units in Spain were recruiting volunteers with posters. One of these was put up by the Requetes, those traditionalists who might be called the Jacobites of Spain. The poster offered no pleasures of travel, no bonuses, no benefits of an incidental education. It simply showed a dead Requete hanging on barbed wire, and over him glowed a star under which was written: “Remember-before God there is no unknown soldier.” Death here was not a sentimental symbol with no reference to what dying in battle is really like, for in a civil war like the Spanish no one escapes a close knowledge of death; yet the Requetes continued to volunteer, knowing that for many of them worse deaths awaited than a clean shot on the barbed wire. Even those who will argue that their deaths were Quixotic (and I am not one who would) cannot deny that these men entered into the decisive moment of their existence certain their lives had not been in vain: their sacrifice would be acknowledged in eternity. Let us hope that the future will not make the same demand on any of us; but whatever coming years may hold in store for us we must recover the understanding that what we do is done in God’s sight. It will be the source of our courage and our assurance that our works, so far as men’s can, will endure."
* Reprinted from The Divine Right of Minorities by Otto Von Habsburg, Modern Age: A Conservative Review, Summer 1958, pg. 284
