I remember reading, at an early age, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. The hero of that book is Mr. Phileas Fogg, a Frenchman’s notion of an English Gentleman: taciturn, solitary, obsessively punctual, living his life according to a strict routine – in short, anal-retentive in the extreme. At the beginning of the […]
Conservative Quotes
A conservative government is an organised hypocrisy. (On Robert Peel’s government)
It seems to me a barren thing this conservatism – an unhappy cross breed, the mule of politics that engenders nothing.
I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
An immigrant society cannot be conservative in its temperment. Significance belongs not to the achievement of today but to the perspectives which today’s experience opens up for tomorrow’s expansion. It is in the construction of new communities that men achieve their highest sense of creativity.
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact.
Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
The highest function of conservatism is to keep what progressiveness has accomplished.
