Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.

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.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.