15 quotes
Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
If a man acknowledges no authority, he sets himself up as Cain, and before long he is struck down by nemesis, which follows upon hubris.
Prescription, Authority, and Ordered Freedom,” in What is Conservatism? (1964)
True conservatism rises at the antipodes from individualism. Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
The Roots of American Order (1974)
Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.
Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective (1989)
When heaven and earth have passed away, perhaps the conservative mind and the libertarian mind may be joined in synthesis, but not until then.
Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries (1981)
The conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.
There are six canons of conservative thought
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lonelines.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.
The Politics Of Prudence (1993)
Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists, but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians.
Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries (1981)
Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)
Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953)