In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.
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.
The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.
Nothing is more useful than the useless.
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion; But regard it not a pearl of price – it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.
In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art – not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
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.
Kant’s position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.
Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.
Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable.