Submission

The pundits emphasized the extreme fragility of the democratic process: as a matter of electoral law, if even one polling station failed to report its results, anywhere in France, that invalidated the entire election. It was also emphasized that, until now, no group had ever thought of exploiting this weakness.

literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

Highways are never crowded on Sunday morning. That’s the moment when society takes a deep breath and decongests, when its members give themselves the brief illusion of an individual existence.

To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you’re always likely to run afoul of some agency or other.

A couple is a world, autonomous and enclosed, that moves through the larger world essentially untouched; on my own, I was full of chips and cracks,

One pillar of Chesterton and Belloc’s philosophy was the principle of subsidiarity: that no entity (social, financial, or political) could take charge of any function if it could be handled by a smaller entity. Pope Pius XI defined the principle in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and to commit

For these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam—that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, th

“It’s submission,” Rediger murmured. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.