44 quotes
In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.
How to Be a Conservative (2014)
A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.
Culture Counts (2007)
Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)
Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.
Modern Culture (2000)
[T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.
Culture Counts (2007)
It was quite by chance that I should be trotting down a Cotswold lane on a friend's old pony when the uniformed centaurs came galloping past.
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)
We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric.
Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (2017)
The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.
All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.
The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.
Modern Culture (2000)
This "knowing what to do"… is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.
Culture Counts (2007)
A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint–for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.
There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.
National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.
England and the Need for Nations (2006)
I don't think you can be a conservative in the end without being some kind of nationalist. You are always going to have in the back of your mind a conception of the community whose structure you are trying to retain.
It is difficult for many people today to understand how you can be bound by a code of honour and sympathy to an animal that you are intending to kill; but this is exactly what was once understood by chivalry and it is perhaps a function of sport to cultivate the spirit of chivalry in those who engage in it.
The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.
If there is a single most deplorable intellectual failing on the conservative side, it lies in reducing every question of law, constitution, culture and society to a question of economics — the fundamental error of the Marxists, which nobody on the left would now dream of committing.
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
A Political Philosophy (2006)