Nearly everyone who thinks seriously about anything will tell you they think for themselves. The opposite – parroting other people’s ideas and opinions – is widely derided on both the left and right, and one side will frequently accuse the other of repeating things they read in The New York Times or saw on a Tucker Carlson podcast.

The problem is that, to one degree or another, we all outsource our thinking and are influenced by ideas that are not our own. How could it be otherwise? The real measure of thinking for yourself, then, is perhaps the ability to change your mind, take the view that runs contrary to your group, not out of contrariness but because you’ve followed a thought a little further than is comfortable.

The writers and thinkers below understood this better than most.

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

— Bertrand Russell

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Even the lively debate within this spectrum gives the impression of free thinking, but all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate."

— Noam Chomsky

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

— Marcus Aurelius

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

— Oscar Wilde

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

— Upton Sinclair

“The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

— John Stuart Mill

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”

— Galileo

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell (attributed)

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

— Mark Twain

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”

— Albert Einstein

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By Frederick Alexander

The Gadfly looks at the ideas, institutions, and incentives behind our cultural confusion – who benefits, why it persists, and what it costs.

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For many people today, and the young especially, a conservative is someone who is suspicious of the future and allergic to progress. It’s the reactionary who wants to preserve the status quo because the status quo preserves his power and influence. It’s the stiff in tweed sitting in a house he bought 50 years ago for the price of a vanilla latte, complaining about “the youth today” while foaming at stories in the Daily Mail about immigrants.

The thinkers below had no patience for these caricatures, and neither should you. What unites the conservatives we're looking at here is an understanding that good things are fragile and that traditions are often inherited forms of knowledge and wisdom. For conservatives, the work of building civilised institutions is slow, difficult, and even a little dull. But they understand that tearing them down, while thrilling and self-flattering, is also often irreversible.

None of which is to say that reform is bad. The conservative disposition, rightly understood, is about the insistence on knowing what it is you’re reforming and why. Before you tear down the fence in the field, find out why someone built it. If you’re incurious about that question or hold it in disdain, the rest of us might fairly wonder who gave you permission to act on our behalf and what the consequences might be. History has repeatedly shown us that when those questions don’t arise, or can’t arise in an unfree society, catastrophe awaits.

This selection of quotes below features Roger Scruton above all because he distilled, better than almost anyone since Chesterton (who gave his name to the fence above), the qualities of the conservative disposition. Things like gratitude, restraint, and piety toward the past, as well as the tragic sense of human nature and the suspicion of schemes that promise liberation while dissolving the conditions that make freedom possible.

You will also find Burke, Scruton’s great inspiration, who looked on as a revolution that promised heaven delivered the guillotine instead. His warnings about the French Revolution helped form one of the foundational texts of modern conservatism. The forces he feared – fanaticism, political vanity, and the loss of temperance – lurk at the edge of any society that forgets how fragile civilisation is, which is to say every society we care to look at today.

Chesterton is here too, because he spotted early on the arrogance of a managerial class busily dismantling things they had not first taken the trouble to understand. This, of course, is the class of people that incur so much of the public wrath today, and for precisely these reasons.

Taken together, these quotes offer a brief introduction to the conservative disposition: the inclination to defend our inheritance against those who despise it or merely don’t understand it, or wilfully misunderstand it. The same inclination emphasises gratitude over vanity and favours careful, thoughtful change over the modern belief that sweeping things away is a form of cultural intelligence rather than reckless naivety.

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created... In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.”

— Roger Scruton

“Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

— Edmund Burke

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

— Thomas Sowell

“To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

— Michael Oakeshott

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Conservatism is more an instinct than an idea. But it’s the instinct that I think we all ultimately share, at least if we are happy in this world. It’s the instinct to hold on to what we love, to protect it from degradation and violence and to build our lives around it.”

— Roger Scruton

“A conservative temperament has something to do with a deep understanding of the inherent value of the world, and its vulnerable and precarious nature. It is suspicious of the impulse to tear things down, dismantle things, cancel things, burn things to the ground... The conservative understands about loss and about grief.”

— Nick Cave

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”

―Gustav Mahler

“For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.”

— Roger Scruton

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected... Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”

— Roger Scruton

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Imagine losing all your political freedoms. What would it look like? Perhaps you picture the blaze of revolution – a political earthquake, jackboots marching through the streets. That happens, of course. History is full of it.

But the more likely scenario is freedom withering away bit by bit, surrendered on promises of greater security and personal safety. The truth is that many of us are willing to give up our freedoms and quick to trust administrators and experts to act in the greater good. Those less inclined shouldn’t be surprised when a police squad eventually turns up to ask about something you posted online.

The thinkers below understood this: that political freedom is easy to give away and almost impossible to reclaim, especially when it is taken under the auspices of good intentions.

If you’ve noticed the emperor has no clothes, but everyone around you keeps complimenting his trousers, subscribe. There are more of us than you think

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“Of all tyrannies, that exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

– C. S. Lewis

“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

– Friedrich Hayek

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it.”

– Thomas Sowel

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.”

– Thomas Paine

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

– Søren Kierkegaard.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

– George Orwell

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

– Voltaire

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

– Milton Friedman

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

– John Stuart Mill

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

– James Madison

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

– Ronald Reagan

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By Frederick Alexander

The Gadfly looks at the ideas, institutions, and incentives behind our cultural confusion – who benefits, why it persists, and what it costs.

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