Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Quotes

“Less glory is more liberty. When the drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books”
― Albert Pike, MORALS and DOGMA of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light from them and to draw them away from it. p.104-5”
― Pike, Albert, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“That which we do for ourselves dies with us … that which we do for others lives forever.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“A free people, forgetting that it has a soul to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The freest people, like the freest man, is always in danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their power. They spring, for the most part, from evil counsels. When the small and the base are intrusted with power, legislation and administration become but two parallel series of errors and blunders, ending in war, calamity, and the necessity for a tyrant. When the nation feels its feet sliding backward, as if it walked on the ice, the time has come for a supreme effort. The magnificent tyrants of the past are but the types of those of the future. Men and nations will always sell themselves into slavery, to gratify their passions and obtain revenge. The tyrant's plea, necessity, is always available; and the tyrant once in power, the necessity of providing for his safety makes him savage. Religion is a power, and he must control that. Independent, its sanctuaries might rebel. Then it becomes unlawful for the people to worship God in their own way, and the old spiritual despotisms revive.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“If, anywhere, brethren of a particular religious belief have been excluded from this Degree [18° Knight Rose Croix], it merely shows how gravely the purposes and plan of Masonry may be misunderstood. For whenever the door of any Degree is closed against him who believes in one God and the soul's immortality, on account of the other tenets of his faith, that Degree is Masonry no longer.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The law of our being is Love of Life, and its interests and adornments; love of the world in which our lot is cast, engrossment with the interests and affections of earth. Not a low or sensual love; not love of wealth, of fame, of ease, of power, of splendor. Not low worldliness; but the love of Earth as the garden on which the Creator has lavished such miracles of beauty; as the habitation of humanity, the arena of its conflicts, the scene of its illimitable progress, the dwelling-place of the wise, the good, the active, the loving, and the dear; the place of opportunity for the development by means of sin and suffering and sorrow, of the noblest passions, the loftiest virtues, and the tenderest sympathies.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“The freest people, like the freest man, is always in danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their power.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“When the thirst for wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well dishonestly as honestly; by frauds and overreachings, by the knaveries of trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by gambling in stocks and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men will speculate upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of their country. Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be blown up by cunning knavery, with stupid credulity as its assistants and instrument. Huge bankruptcies, that startle a country like the earth-quakes, and are more fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of the savings of the poor, expansions and collapses of the currency, the crash of banks, the depreciation of Government securities, prey on the savings of self-denial, and trouble with their depredations the first nourishment of infancy and the last sands of life, and fill with inmates the churchyards and lunatic asylums.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“The Teachers, even of Christianity, are in general, the most ignorant of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as incomprehensible as the Sohar. p. 105”
― Pike, Albert, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“If you would understand the true secrets of Alchemy, you must study the works of the Masters with patience and assiduity. Every word is often an enigma; and to him who reads in haste, the whole will seem absurd. Even when they seem to teach that the Great Work is the purification of the Soul, and so deal only with morals, they most conceal their meaning, and deceive all but the Initiates.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“Constitutions and Laws, without Genius and Intellect to govern, will not prevent decay. In that case they have the dry-rot and the life dies out of them by degrees.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the ugliness of the tyranny.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“She must, above all things, be just, not truckling to the strong and warring on or plundering the weak; she must act on the square with all nations, and the feeblest tribes; always keeping her faith, honest in her legislation, upright in all her dealings. Whenever such a Republic exists, it will be immortal: for rashness, injustice, intemperance and luxury in prosperity, and despair and disorder in adversity, are the causes of the decay and dilapidation of nations.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“Thus the scientific theories of the ancients, expounded in the Mysteries, as to the origin of the soul, its descent, its sojourn here below, and its return, were not a mere barren contemplation of the nature of the world, and of the intelligent beings existing there. They were not an idle speculation as to the order of the world, and about the soul, but a study of the means for arriving at the great object proposed, the perfecting of the soul; and, as a necessary consequence, that of morals and society. This Earth, to them, was not the Soul's home, but its place of exile. Heaven was its home, and there was its birth-place. To it, it ought incessantly to turn its eyes. Man was not a terrestrial plant. His roots were in Heaven. The soul had lost its wings, clogged by the viscosity of matter. It would recover them when it extricated itself from matter and commenced its upward flight.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“If his country should be robbed of her liberties, he should still not despair. The protest of the Right against the Fact persists forever.”
― Albert Pike, Morals And Dogma

“The unruliest of men bend before the leader that has the sense to see and the will to do.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The divine in human nature disappears and interest, greed and selfishness takes it place.
When a Republic begins to plunder its neighbors the words of doom are already written upon its walls.”
― Albert Pike , Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The absolute in reason and will is the greatest power which is given to men to attain; and it is by means of this power that what the multitude admires under the name of miracles, are effected.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“Thus there is an Absolute, in the matters of Intelligence and of Faith. The Supreme Reason has not left the gleams of the human understanding to vacillate by hazard. There is an incontestable verity, there is an infallible method of knowing this verity, and by the knowledge of it, those who accept it as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them masters of inferior things and of all errant spirits that is to say, will make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be proscribed by the Christians, and the official Sanctuary was closed against high initiation. Thus the Hierarchy of Knowledge was compromitted by the violences of usurping ignorance, and the disorders of the Sanctuary are reproduced in the State; for always, willingly or unwillingly, the King is sustained by the Priest, and it is from the eternal Sanctuary of the Divine instruction that the Powers of the Earth, to insure themselves durability, must receive their consecration and their force.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“It was the remembrance of this scientific and religious Absolute, of this doctrine that is summed up in a word, of this Word, in fine, alternately lost and found again, that was transmitted to the Elect of all the Ancient Initiations: it was this same remembrance, preserved, or perhaps profaned in the celebrated Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and, above all, of their mutual devotedness and of their power.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed under the shadows of the Ancient Mysteries it was imperfectly revealed or rather disfigured by the Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities that cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is found enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in the Rights of the Highest Masonry.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be enemies of the Papacy than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against Popes and Kings, it was because they considered them personally as apostates from duty and supreme favors of anarchy. What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned anarchist?”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The Initiates, in fact, thought in the eighteenth century that their time had arrived, some to found a new Hierarchy, others to overturn all authority, and to press down all the summits of the Social Order under the level of Equality.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The end of the drama is well known, and how Jacques de Molai and his fellows perished in the flames. But before his execution, the Chief of the doomed Order organized and instituted what afterward came to be called Occult, Hermetic, or Scottish Masonry. In the gloom of his prison, the Grand Master created four Metropolitan Lodges, at Naples for the East, at Edinburg for the West, at Stockholm for the NOrth, and at Paris for the South. [The initials of his name, J.'.B.'.M.'. found in the same order in the first three Degrees, are but one of the many internal and cogent profs that such was the origin of modern Free-Masonry. The legend of Osiris was revived and adopted, to symbolize the destruction of the Order, and the resurrection of Hyrim, slain in the body of the Temple, of Hyrim Abai, the Master, as the martyr of fidelity to obligation, of Truth and Conscience, prophesied the restoration to life of the buried association.]”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations, had two doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they deceived adversaries whom they sought to supplant. Hence Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with the Dionysian Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint John the Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order not to arouse the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus covertly proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essinism together.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“...thus it is, according to the general understanding, that one fights well the battle of life. Even to succeed in business by that boldness which halts for no risks, that audacity which stakes all upon hazardous chances; by the shrewdness of the close dealer, the boldness of the unscrupulous operator, even by the knaveries of the stock-board and the gold-room; to crawl up into place by disreputable means or the votes of brutal ignorance,-these also are deemed to be among the great successes of life.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“This idea presided at the foundation of the great religious orders, so often at war with secular authorities, ecclesiastical or civil. Its realization was also the dream of the dissident sects of Gnostics or Illuminati who pretended to connect their faith with the primitive tradition of the Christianity of Saint John. It at length became a menace for the Church and Society, when a rich and dissolute Order, initiated in mysterious doctrines of the Kabalah, seemed disposed to turn against legitimate authority the conservative principle of Hierarchy, and threatened the entire world with an immense revolution.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry