A Conservative Handbook of Quotations

The only political system that seems to allow this inherent liberty to express itself in time and space is democracy. It is not enough to have spiritual liberty; people must be free to express themselves publicly in worldly structures and systems. Among such systems, democracy is assuredly flawed, like all things human. Yet no other system protects human rights as well. Democracy means not majority rule alone, but also the protection of human rights, including the rights of the unborn.
Michael Novak (1933- )

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
New York Times (1 Feb. 1931)

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)
Hansard 11 Nov. 1947. col. 206

Democracy is the idea of the state without limits.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

Democracy is more expensive than monarchy; it is incompatible with liberty.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

Democracy is nothing but tyranny of the majorities, the most execrable tyranny of all because it rests neither on the authority of a religion, nor on the nobility of race, nor on the prerogatives of talent or property. Its foundation is numbers and its mask is the name of the people.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

Left to themselves or led by a tribune, the masses will never accomplish anything. They have their faces turned to the past. No tradition is formed among them . . . about politics they understand nothing but intrigues, about the government only waste and sheer force; of justice only the accusations; of liberty only the erection of idols which are destroyed the next day. The rise of democracy starts an era of backwardness that will lead nation and state to their death.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

Democracy is an aristocracy of mediocrities.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

When we say "the People" we always unavoidably mean the least progressive part of society, the most ignorant, the most cowardly, the most ungrateful.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

Had every Athenian been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would have been a mob.
Federalist, No. 55

I read in any number of new leaders and labour weeklies, and all sorts of papers supposed to be both progressive and popular, that the working-classes will now take over the government of the country; that the majority of manual workers will have their proper proportional right to rule in all matters of education and humanitarian reform; that the poor will at least inherit the earth. But if I say that one workman is capable of deciding about the education of one child, that he has the right to select a certain school or resist a certain system, I shall have all those progressive papers roaring at me as a rotten reactionary.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

It is the people who control the Government - not the Government the people.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
George Will (1941- )

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and defy the clamour of the multitude are not fit to be ministers in times of difficulty.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Nothing is more dangerous . . . than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

It is not the business of politicians to please everyone.
Margaret Thatcher (1925- )

A mandatory revolving door for elected officials would only strengthen the grip of the permanent bureaucracy. Representative government would be the loser.
Henry Hyde (1924- )

When one has reached the summit of power and surmounted so many obstacles, there is a danger of becoming convinced that one can do anything one likes and that any strong personal view is necessarily acceptable to the nation and can be enforced upon one's subordinates.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan (1911- )

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
Baron Charles Louis Secondat de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Spirit of the Laws

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The Twilight of the Idols; Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer: Expeditions of an Untimely Man. (aphorism 38)

. . . government always becomes less popular in proportion as it becomes less local. The perfect democracy is a parish democracy; and though there are doubtless, defects in this type of community, there are far greater dangers in departing from it too far.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

It is therefore the very opposite of the truth to say that the police fail through lack of organisation. It is much nearer the truth to say that they fail because society is being far too much organised. A scheme of official control which is too ambitious for human life has broken down, and broken down exactly where we need it most. Instead of law being a strong cord to bind what it is really possible to bind, it has become a thin net to cover what it is quite impossible to cover. It is the nature of a net so stretched to break everywhere; and the practical result of our bureaucracy is something very near to anarchy.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Regulations arise, not from the strength of the regulator, but from the timidity of the regulated.
J.B.R. Yant

One cannot make men good by an Act of Parliament.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. . . . They come from a peculiar type of brainy people, always found in our country, who if they add something to our culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

"The Four Great Myths" that define our times - "the four horsemen of the present apocalypse."
Myth #1 - the "goodness of man"
Myth #2 - the promise of coming utopia - "This is the myth that human nature can be perfected by government; that a new Jerusalem can be built using the tools of politics."
Myth #3 - the relativity of moral values
Myth #4 - radical individualism
Charles Colson (1931- )

The flame of Christian ethics is still our best guide . . . only on this basis can we reconcile the rights of the individual with the demands of society.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

. . . has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor?
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

. . . nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Sensuality often hastens the growth of love so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Beyond Good and Evil (aphorism 120)

The only question remaining about the decline of Western civilization is the pace.
Robert H. Bork (1927- )

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

If you separate learning from religion, learning will destroy religion.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

. . . all education is religious education - and never more than when it is irreligious education. It either teaches a definite doctrine about the universe, which is theology; or else it takes it for granted, which is mysticism. If it does not do that it does nothing at all, and means nothing at all, for everything must depend upon some first principles and refer to some causes, expressed or unexpressed.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Our schools always had an ideological bent to their education. These days they too often have a mere educational bent to their central mission of ideology.
William A. Henry III (1950-1994)
In Defense of Elitism

[E]ducation is, after all, a serious business. Its lifeblood is standards. If there are no standards, how do we call something higher education?
William J. Bennett (1943- )

Most education certification today is pure "credentialism." [It] must begin to reflect our demand for excellence, not our appreciation of parchment.
William J. Bennett (1943- )

Education . . . has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G.M. Trevelyan (1876-1962)

Questions are the important thing. Answers are less important. Learning to ask good questions is the heart of intelligence. Learning the answer - well, answers are for students. Questions are for thinkers.
Roger C. Schank (1946- )

Some of the most enormous and idiotic developments of our modern thought and speech arise simply from not knowing the parts of speech and principles of language, which we once knew when we were children. . . . For most fundamental falsehoods are errors in language as well as in philosophy. Most statements that are unreasonable are really ungrammatical.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe - and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it. In short, they always have an unconscious dogma; and an unconscious dogma is the definition of a prejudice.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.
James Burnham (1905-1987)
Suicide of the West

The things that happened in academia in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s led to dangerous politicization that is inimicable to what colleges and universities should be doing . . . this is an attack on the very idea of meritocracy, objectivity and neutral principles. . . . There is much more pressure to conform on campus than in the larger society.
James Pierson

What we sense is that something has gone very wrong with America's moral and social infrastructure. Our real problem is the cultural revolution that swept America in the '60s. That is not to say that economic issues are not important, but that the cultural and social issues are far more important to Americans. We must re-fight the [cultural] battles we lost in the '60s. The counter-march will not be easy; but if conservatism is to live, we must do it.
Robert Bork
Oct. 01, 1997 - from a speech to the International Conservative Congress in Washington

Many teachers now consider the traditional idea of teaching to be intellectually suspect and morally offensive because it is tainted by the authoritarian idea that there are defensible standards and by the inegalitarian idea that some people do things better than others. The idea of transmitting skills and standards was inherently threatening to the values of that decade - spontaneity, authenticity, sincerity, equality and self-esteem. Education in the new era of enlightenment was to be a matter not of putting things into students but of letting things out.
George Will (1941- )

The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity in the things that matter is utopian.
Thomas Sowell (1930- )

The notion that mere doubt, which is only timid and indefinite destruction, can be a positive pleasure and a substitute for all other pleasures, is crazy enough to anyone who knows what more creative or constructive pleasures can be. But, crazy as it is, it could not even be conveyed to the mind of the reader if there were not some "certitude" about the meaning of the word that he reads. All this special sort of scepticism is not merely engaged in destroying or devouring life; it is engaged in destroying and devouring itself. Its own method would exterminate its own mood; and it could not even continue its own unnatural intellectual life if it were conducted in the full light of intellect.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

How can the modern relativist exercise tolerance if he doesn't believe in anything to begin with? It is not hard to exhibit tolerance toward a point of view if you have no point of view of your own with which that point of view conflicts.
William F. Buckley Jr. (1925- )
Up From Liberalism

Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough. . . . A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional or (as they would say) 'sentimental' values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away from the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that 'real' or 'basic' values may emerge.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? . . . . Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

The important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the fact that they have an end at all. . . . And this end must have real value in their eyes. To abstain from calling it good and to use, instead, such predicates as 'necessary' or 'progressive' or 'efficient' would be a subterfuge. They could be forced by argument to answer the questions 'necessary for what?', 'progressing towards what?' 'effecting what?'; in the last resort they would have to admit that some state of affairs was in their opinion good for its own sake. And this time they could not maintain that 'good' simply described their own emotion about it.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao [traditional values], and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao. . . . If the Tao falls, all his own conceptions of value fall with it. . . . Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is he enabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither have those he retains: if what he retains is valid, what he rejects is equally valid too.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Abolition of Man

. . . the open mind is a little too like the open mouth. Sometimes it is a little too much akin to the empty soul. But in a very large number of cases, it is something that corresponds to an honest workman out of work; it is simply unemployed.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

What seems to me to infect the modern world is a sort of swollen pride in the possession of modern thought or free thought or higher thought, combined with a comparative neglect of thought. So long as certain atmospheric phrases are adopted, or avoided, it does not seem to matter so much what is the actual substance of the statement. Certain turns of diction are marked down as progressive or provocative or obstructive or complimentary or uncomplimentary, long before anybody troubles to consider the smaller problem of whether they are true.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

Of what value is a good wind to a man who does not know to where he is sailing?
Socrates (469-399 B.C.)

The strength and character of a national civilization is not built up like a scaffolding or fitted together like a machine. Its growth is more like that of a plant or a tree. . . No one should ever cut one down without planting another. It is very much easier to cut down trees than to grow them.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
Enlivening the Conservative Mind

When a judge applies a statute he asks: "What did Congress understand itself to be doing with this statute?" Since the Constitution is a legal document, it should be approached in the same way. The danger comes when the Court cuts loose from that standard method of interpretation and begins to act as the final legislature, allowing justices to write their own moral or political principles into the Constitution. Because then we've essentially lost our form of government.
Robert H. Bork (1927- )

When a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.
Robert H. Bork (1927- )

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.
Robert H. Bork (1927- )
The Tempting of America

I have spent nearly 50 years as a reporter covering "the law." I am wearily aware that if an arrest is made, the probabilities are strong that the accused will slip through holes in the net. The warrant will be defective, or the Miranda rights will not have been properly read, or a jury will not have been correctly impanelled. I believe deeply in constitutional rights and the rule of law, but disillusion seeps in. I am sick of societal attitudes that coddle the venomous spider and disdain the innocent fly.
James Kilpatrick (1920- )

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992)

In my experience of large enterprises, I have found it is often a mistake to try to settle everything at once.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

It is better to have an ambitious plan than none at all.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Activity of mind is not necessarily strength of mind.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)

It is all very well to play for a while with fools . . . but fools must be changed fairly often or the entertainment becomes tiresome.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge.
Rutherford D. Rogers (1915- )

Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one.
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978)

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Official jargon can be used to destroy any kind of human contact or even thought itself.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

I fancy that a man grows less controversial as he grows more convinced. Perhaps the moment when he is most controversial is when he is convincing himself. I know that since my own views have grown much more settled and satisfied, I am less inclined than I was to go about incessantly contradicting everybody who contradicts them.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Criticism is easy, achievement is difficult.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

The more knowledge we possess of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do.
Sir Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

When reasoning is against a man, a man will be against reason.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

If your ideals ignore reason, your instincts will ignore restraint.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Idealism is an excuse for insurrection. . . .
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

. . . nowadays the insistence on ideals is almost in inverse ratio to the insistence on ideas. If ever we encounter a pompous politician on the platform, a pretentious and maudlin play at the playhouse or picture-house, a sentimental sensational report in the newspapers, a limp and patronising leading article, a broad-minded and empty-headed sermon, a mealy-mouthed and meaningless message to all the nations, probably about peace . . . in short, if we encounter any of the voices or organs of expression that chiefly rule our civilised society to-day, we shall find them all at one in the possession of two characteristics: a lack of ideas and a lust for ideals. Ideals are the substitute for ideas among people whom the modern rule of enlightenment and compulsory education has left without so much as the idea of an idea.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Our fathers understood a thing called doctrine; that is, a thing in which they did or did not believe. Our fathers also understood a thing called duty; that is, a thing which they did or did not do, but which they recognised the rightness of doing, and even of doing promptly and properly . . . the slimy, slippery, sneakish ideal gets past both these old arresting conceptions. An ideal is not a thing you are required to believe in, in the old sense of believing that it really exists. On the contrary, for many modern realists, it is a thing that is only called an ideal because it does not exist. It is at best a possibility, or perhaps only a pattern or abstract method of measurement. The less it is a reality, the more it is an ideal. . . .
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Politicians aren't philosophers, and in that sense expedience is, so to speak, what they do. But it is disorienting to lose all contact with the illumination of philosophy.
William F. Buckley Jr. (1925- )

Political theory sometimes seems an intellectual parlor game, an arena for academic poseurs, with little or no relevance to political reality.
Robert H. Bork (1927- )

Men at a distance from the objects of useful knowledge, untouched by the motives that animate an active and a vigorous mind, could produce only the jargon of a technical language, and accumulate the impertinence of academical forms.
Adam Ferguson (1723-1816)
An Essay on the History of Civil Society

Culture is, above all, unity of style in all the expressions of the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is lack of style, or a chaotic jumble of all styles.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Untimely Meditations

Civilisation in the best sense merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all externals. Barbarism means the worship of those externals in their crude and unconquered state. Barbarism means the worship of Nature; and in recent poetry, science, and philosophy there has been too much of the worship of Nature. Whenever men begin to talk much and with great solemnity about the forces outside man, the note of it is barbaric. When men talk much about heredity and environment they are almost barbarians. The modern men of science are many of them almost barbarians.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

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