A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
A society which denies the heart its role becomes, in very short order, a heartless society.
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.
Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility.
I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.
If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure.
Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except the gratification of the ego; in politics it must end in anarchy. It is not possible for one man to be both Christian and Individualist.
It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.
Life is for action, and if we desire to know anything, we must make up our minds to be ignorant about much.
Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.
Moral decay first hampers and then strangles honest government, regular commerce, and even the ability to take genuine pleasure in the goods of this world.
Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.
Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.
Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.
The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained.
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called 'the permanent things'-the norms of human action.
The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.
The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks, and middle-class straights.
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity.
We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present.
What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever. To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire.
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