Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility. Submission to the dictates of humility formerly was made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace; that elaborate doctrine has been overwhelmed by modern presumption.

If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests.

Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.