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Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
"Political Education" (1951)

— Michael Oakeshott Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

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More quotes by Michael Oakeshott

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)

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)

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Oakeshott (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.