Maurice Cowling Quotes
1926–2005 England
Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 – 25 August 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
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Random Maurice Cowling quote
8 quotes
If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill.
The Present Position (1978)
Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics.
I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections.
[L]ow-keyed respectability...is the real religion of the English people.
The Present Position (1978)
What needs to be explained is not particularly why Roman Catholics go to church, but why Protestants don't. Somehow the gut seems to have gone out of English Protestantism. It's turned into these post-Christian moralistic sentiments.
[It is] rational pessimism that provides the strongest justification for a conservative politics.
The Present Position (1978)
The objection of substance to this position is that, in the hands of those who actually believe it, as Mr Lane has shown at the Race Relations Board, it becomes an exercise in liberal fascism, dedicating itself to the improvement of the nation's mind whether the nation's mind wishes to be improved or not, and showing itself only too willing to suppress expressions of opinion that conflict with it.
The Present Position (1978)
If you ask me whether I was deeply Christian, the answer is that I went to college chapel and had a strong polemical Christianity... It could well be that it was a polemical conviction against liberalism rather than a real conviction of the truth of Christianity.