Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat..

Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us..

Education is ... the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which….

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any ext….

The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better..

The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion pr….

Politics I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together. In this s….

We consider ourselves to be free because no one in our society is allowed unlimited powerno leader, faction, party or 'class', no majority, no govern….

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-….

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; h….

Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning..

The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but….

History is what the evidence compels us to believe..

It is difficult to thinkof any circumstances where learning may be said to be impossible..

It is certain that most who concentrate upon achievement miss life..

The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny..

To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise..

For most people, political activity is a secondary activity - that is to say, they have something else to do beside attending to these arrangements. ….

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, ….

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper re….

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of….