by Edmund Burke To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and [...]
Eric Christiansen in The Spectator had some interesting things to say in a review of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting (and why it still matters) by Philip Hensher. Enjoy "...something can be done to prepare children for writing beforehand. For example, if you live near a common, poultry market or farm, get them to collect goose feathers. [...]
Our tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a few men deeply concerns me. We can be conquered by bombs or by subversion; but we can also be conquered by neglect—by ignoring the Constitution and disregarding the principles of limited government. I am convinced that most Americans now want to reverse the trend. I [...]
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” For books on Politics and Economics visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for [...]
From the The Matrix Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.–The Architect (The Matrix Reloaded) For more on the Matrix Trilogy visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. […]
Russell Kirk All history, and especially modern history, is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss. In this process, the rise of the modern State has been by far the most powerful influence. ‘The single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has [...]
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life. Few men have known better than he* how to give just place to the claims of the public and of the private life; few men have had better opportunity, few of those having the [...]
Relativists are an endangered species on America’s campuses, and in 30 years they will probably be extinct—or, if not, then sequestered in made-up departments that are denigrated by the rest of the faculty and eyed predatorily by budget directors on the lookout for programs to cut. The Yale English department is a good example. In [...]
“In the violent conflicts which now trouble the earth the active contenders believe that since the struggle is so deadly it must be that the issues which divide them are deep. I think they are mistaken. Because parties are bitterly opposed, it does not necessarily follow that they have radically different purposes. The intensity of [...]
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service [...]
Once in the British Museum...I overheard a conversation between two attendants in blue uniforms. One asked the other where so-and-so—obviously another attendant–was; and the first replied: 'Oh, he's in the Illuminated,' meaning, of course, the Illuminated Manuscripts Room. Thenceforth, we adopted the term the Illuminated being the world of the imagination, as Wordsworth's Sunless Land was [...]
“I no longer pretend to understand the world…The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears. The things we hold dear are reviled and spat upon….It’s an interesting age you will live in—though I can’t say I’m sorry to miss it. But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the [...]
“First of all no art, and particularly and especially no literary art, can exist in a vacuum. We are , in in practice, creatures of divers interests, and in many of our ordinary interests there is not obvious coherence.” (598) “I do not suppose that there ever has been, or will be, a critic of [...]
“The world was soon to be set on a course that was proletarian and ruthless; the fire of war was soon to devastate the green shoots that showed above ground in T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, in Tom Burns’ Essays in Order, in the Neo-Thomism of Maritain. The bitter frosts that followed the war were to finish [...]