Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity.Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

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.

Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.

The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.