Conservatism Quotes

“Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“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, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Social traditions, Burke pointed out, are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, and the inherited solutions to problems that we all encounter. Like those cognitive abilities that pre-date civilisation they are *adaptations*, but adaptations of the community rather than of the individual organism. Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.

.... [F]or Burke, traditions and customs distil information about the indefinitely many strangers living *then*, information that we need if we are to accommodate our conduct to the needs of absent generations.

Moreover, in discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing *answers* that have been discovered to enduring *questions*. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. Those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, far less justify them. Hence Burke described them as 'prejudices', and defended them on the grounds that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“For Medieval craftsmen, work was an act of piety and was sanctified in their own eyes as in the eyes of their God. For such labourers, end and means are one and he spiritual wholeness of faith is translated into the visual wholeness and purify of their craft. hence their craft was also art, a permanent testimony to the reality on earth of humanity's spiritual redemption.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Throughout his life Hayek wanted to affirm his identity with the classic liberal tradition, believing that the true cause of the crises leading to two world wars was the steady increase increase in the power of the state, and its misuse in the pursuit of unattainable goals. 'Social justice' was the name of one of these goals, and Hayek expressly dismissed the expression as a piece of deceptive Newspeak, used to advance large-scale injustice in the name of its opposite.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Burke rejected the liberal idea of the social contract, as a deal agreed among living people. Society, he argued, does not contain the living only; it is an association between the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract but something more akin to trusteeship. It is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognise that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil but ours to safeguard for our dependents.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Burke rejected the liberal idea of the social contract, as a deal agreed among living people. Society, he argued, does not contain the living only; it is an association between the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract but something more akin to trusteeship. It is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognise that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil but ours to safeguard for our dependents. There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line. We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on. Concern for future generations is a non-specific outgrowth of gratitude. It does not calculate, because it shouldn't and can't.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“It is a repeated error among intellectual historians to assume that ideas have a self-contained history of their own, and that one idea gives rise to another in something like the way one weather system gives rise to the next. Marxists, who regard ideas as by-products of economic forces, commit the opposite error, dismissing the intellectual life as entirely subservient to material causes. The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says. As the American conservative Richard Weaver put it, in the title of a famous and influential book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and this is as true of conservative ideas as it is of ideas propagated on the left. To understand the pre-history of conservatism, therefore, one should accept that ideas have far-reaching influence over human affairs; but one should recognise also that they do not arise only from other ideas, and often have roots in biological, social and political conditions that lie deeper than rational argument.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Moreover, in discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. Those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, still less to justify them. Hence Burke described them as 'prejudices,' and defended them on the grounds that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty as issuing from political order. What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Classical liberalism tells of the growth of individual liberty against the power of the sovereign. Socialism tells of the steadily increasing equality brought about by the state at the expense of the entrenched hierarchies of social power.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“As I try to show, conservative thinking has never been devoted to freedom alone. Nor has the agenda been about economic freedom, important though that was during the debates and upheavals of the twentieth century. It has been about our whole way of being, as heirs to a great civilisation and a many-layered bequest of laws, institutions and high culture. For conservatives our law-governed society came into being because we have known who we are, and defined our identity not by our religion, our tribe or our race but by our country, the sovereign territory in which we have built the free form of life that we share. And if there is another way of staying together in the world as it is today, I should be interested to hear of it.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Burke's complaint against the revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian reasoning. Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Burke's complaint against the revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were exapropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian reasoning. Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“It is perhaps no accident that recent British conservatism has included so many immigrant voices. For it is the privilege of the immigré to speak without irony of the British Empire and of the unique culture, institutions and laws that have made Britain the safe place of refuge for so many in a smouldering world. Natives are more reluctant to speak out, for fear of the political correctness that sees conservatism, in all its forms, as the enemy. Not censorship only but a culture of repudiation reigns in the media and the universities, and to become known as someone who speaks out for the institutions and hierarchies of Old England is to court ridicule and ostracism from the left establishment.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Cultural conservatism originated in the experience of a way of life that was under threat or disappearing. The memory of that way of life could be preserved, and its spiritual meaning enshrined in works of art. But the way of life itself could not be so easily protected. Should we then appeal to the state to subsidise a dying lifestyle, establishing wildlife parks like those in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which the agrarian way of life stumbles on, unconscious of the world that lies beyond its sensitively policed perimeter? Or should we devote ourselves, instead, to the idea of the thing that we are bound to lose, keeping it alive in art, as did Strauss and von Hofmannsthal in perpetuating the sugar-coated seductiveness of the aristocratic life in Der Rosenkavalier, or D. H. Lawrence in celebrating the close-knit cohesion of the old mining communities in Sons and Lovers? But then, to whom will such works of art be addressed? Necessarily, to those who have become conscious of the old way of life as something lost, something that can be preserved only in this aesthetic form. For its practitioners it would have meant nothing to preserve their way of life as an idea, rather than as the reality of their being in the world. To put it more severely: culture becomes an object of conservation only when it has already been lost.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too.
Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Burke's complaint against the [(French)] revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of the traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and all that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian thinking.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Civil society is, indeed, composed of individuals, acting freely.... But freedom entails responsibility, founded in the sentiments of sympathy that make us strive to look on our own and others' conduct from the standpoint of the impartial judge. The institutions of law and government exist in order to assign responsibilities and to ensure that they are not evaded or abused. Of course, this is something that liberals [(i.e. classical liberal)] too will acknowledge. But the difference of emphasis is crucial to the conservative position. Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“The lesson of history for Hume is that the established order, founded on customs that are followed and accepted, is always to be preferred to the ideas, however exultant and inspiring, of those who would liberate us from our inherited sense of obligation.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Conservatism as we know it today is a distinctively modern outlook, shaped by the Enlightenment and by the emergence of societies in which the ‘we’ of social membership is balanced at every point against the ‘I’ of individual ambition.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“realities instead.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Leviatã (1651) tenta derivar uma descrição de bom governo da suposição de que a “comunidade” é composta de indivíduos capazes de escolher livremente, motivados por suas crenças e desejos. Em estado natural, argumentou Hobbes, esses indivíduos motivados por apetites competirão pelos recursos necessários para sobreviver e prosperar, e o resultado será a guerra de todos contra todos. Nessa condição, a vida será, em suas famosas palavras, “solitária, pobre, suja, brutal e curta”. Mas os indivíduos possuem condições de superar esse estado natural, ao fazerem escolhas racionais e concordarem em agir em benefício mútuo. Assim, estabelecerão contrato para criar um governo que terá soberania sobre todos e fornecerá proteção a cada um. A soberania criada pelo contrato social não será parte do contrato, mas gozará de poder absoluto para impô-lo contra aqueles que tentarem ignorá-lo ou renegá-lo.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservadorismo: Um convite à grande tradição

“Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly-wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism – not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the nineteenth century socialists.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition