8 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)
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)
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)
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)