There is a caricature of the conservative that’s become so familiar it barely needs describing: reactionary, nostalgic and allergic to progress. It conjures the image of someone who thinks nothing should ever change because nothing was ever wrong.
The thinkers below had no patience for that caricature, and neither should you. What unites them is an understanding that good things are fragile and traditions useful; that the work of building them is slow, while tearing them down is easy and likely irreversible.
The selection of quotes features Roger Scruton above all because he distils, better than anyone since Chesterton (also included), the qualities of the conservative disposition and why it’s worth embracing rather than rejecting. You’ll also find Burke (a great inspiration to Scruton) and Nick Cave – an outlier in a popular culture that rewards progressive slogans and disdains anything that sounds a bit to the right.
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“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
“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.”
— G.K. Chesterton
“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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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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