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Michael Oakeshott Quotes
1901–1990 England
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote on the philosophies of history, religion, aesthetics, education, and law.
England Academics Conservatives Critics Historians Also known as: Oakeshott, On Human Conduct
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Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory.
Experience and Its Modes (1933)
Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality are inseparable.
Experience and Its Modes (1933)
By one road or another, by conviction, by its supposed inevitability, by its alleged success, or even quite unreflectively, almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist.
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)
Understanding is not such that we either enjoy it or lack it altogether. To be human and to be aware is to encounter only what is in some manner understood. Thus, it may be said that understanding is an unsought condition; we inexorably inhabit a world of intelligibles.
On Human Conduct (1975)
Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)
Machiavelli was aware of the limitations of technical knowledge; it was not Machiavelli himself, but his followers, who believed in the sovereignty of technique, who believed that government was nothing more than 'public administration' and could be learned from a book.
Rationalism in Politics (1947)
Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic.
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)
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