"Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light."
"Rather than ennobling the public mind and cementing the social fabric, applied science speedily became the chief weapon of a gross individualism, which was anathema to the frugal and righteous (John Quincy) Adams, the source of enormous fortunes divorced from duty, the instrument of unscrupulous ambition and rapacious materialism. Presently, it came to scar the very of the country which Adams loved, a disfiguring process uninterrupted since his day."
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Source: Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.237, Regnery Publishing
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