The Great Debate Quotes

“Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all,” Burke writes.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part,” Burke said.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“No eager democrat, Burke rejected the notion that a member of the Commons must simply express the views of those who sent him, even telling an audience of his own constituents in 1774 that he owed them his judgment rather than his obedience.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“The influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed,” Burke writes.5 We are moved by more than logic, and so politics must answer to more than cold arguments.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages,” Burke writes in the Reflections.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Burke believes that Enlightenment liberals’ and radicals’ emphasis on human reason begins from a misunderstanding of human nature—the mistaking of a part for the whole: “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Human history, Burke writes in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, “consists for the most part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites,” but it also consists of efforts to address these vices, and in both its best and worst manifestations, history offers lessons no statesman can afford to ignore”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to every body else.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part,”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“The influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed,” Burke writes.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Under a cruel king, Burke argues, members of an oppressed minority “have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds.” But under a tyrannical democracy, the public as a whole is against them. “They seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.”17 Their”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle,” Burke writes.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Indeed, Burke argues that change, understood in this way as “a principle of growth,” is not only permissible but essential, and essential precisely to the task of preserving the existing order.49 “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” he writes.50 Such a principle of growth or means of change is intended to be a permanent feature of the regime, not just a path to an ultimate and correct arrangement that would not change further.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy,” Burke wrote in the Reflections, “which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.”58”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“The government of human beings, he argued, is a matter not of applying cold rules and principles, but of tending to warm sentiments and attachments to produce the strongest and best unified community possible.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Burke argued that political parties were not, as many people insisted, factions each contending for its own particular advantage, but rather were bodies of men each united by a vision of the common good of the whole nation. Partisanship, he insisted, was not only unavoidable but also beneficial, as it helped to organize politics into camps defined by different priorities about what was best for the country.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“What is remarkable in Burke’s first performance,” wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, “is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself.”4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“The experience of seeing differences of dogma made moot in practice by the bonds of family affection and neighborly respect was formative for him. It seemed to leave him with a lasting sense that life was more complicated in practice than in theory—and that this was a good thing.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“Believe me, sir,” he writes in the Reflections, “those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

“The idea of forcing every thing to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it,” Burke writes. “It has all the appearance imaginable of justice and good order; and very many persons, without any sort of partial purposes, have been led to adopt such schemes and to pursue them with great earnestness and warmth.”
― Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left