It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.

The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.