When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.

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.

We should not value education as a means to prosperity, but prosperity as a means to education. Only then will our priorities be right. For education, unlike prosperity is an end in itself. .. power and influence come through the acquisition of useless knowledge. . . irrelevant subjects bring understanding of the human condition, by forcing the student to stand back from it.

The sexual parts are not only vivid examples of the body's dominion; they are also apertures whose damp emissions and ammoniac smells testify to the mysterious putrefaction of the body.

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.