Perhaps there is nothing in the world as truly educative as tragedy. When you have known it, you’ve known the worst, and probably also you have had a glimpse of the mystery of things. And if this is so, we may infer that there is nothing which educates or matures a man or a people [...]
Don’t let us utter too much evil of party writers, for we owe them much. If not honest, they are helpful, as the advocates aid the judge; and they would not have done so well from mere inspiration of disinterested veracity. We might wait long if we watched for the man who knows the whole [...]
It may be said, indeed it has been said, that a bill of rights is not necessary, because the establishment of this Government has not repealed those declarations of rights which are added to the several State constitutions; that those rights of the people, which had been established by the most solemn act, could not [...]
The art of war… as it is certainly the noblest of all arts, so in the progress of improvement it necessarily becomes one of the most complicated among them. The state of the mechanical, as well as of some other arts, with which it is necessarily connected, determines the degree of perfection to which it [...]
Taken in its widest sense education is simply the process by which the new members of a community are initiated into its way of life and thought from the simplest elements of behavior up to the highest tradition of spiritual wisdom. Christian education is therefore an initiation into the Christian way of life and thought, [...]
Justice being taken away, then what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. [...]
A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from [...]
For the conservative, the real end of economic production is to raise man above the savage level, to make possible the leisure which sustains civilization, and to free man from the condition of a simple drudge. When efficiency or production becomes an end in itself, then truly technology has triumphed over humanity. —Prospects for Conservatives: [...]
One is born an artist. The artist is a man with a special nature, possessing a peculiar sense…. If one lacks this sense, one is not an artist, and one can never become an artist, one will lose one’s time in hoping. The craft may be learned by study, by observation, by practice; it may [...]
“Saddest of all is a poem engraved upon a slab now in the Leyden Museum, and dating back to 2200 B.C. Carpe diem, it sings—snatch the day! […]
My first and last care is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought…. But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily [...]
The true conservative does defend private enterprise stoutly; and one of the reasons why he cherishes it is that private enterprise is the only really practicable system, in the modern world, for satisfying our economic wants; but even more than this, he defends private enterprise as a means to an end. That end is a society just and free, [...]
Love is the basic act and order of all things because all things are created by God. The most basic fact or truth of all things is at once their analogically conceived goodness or value as gift, a giftedness that is intrinsic to each thing by virtue of its being generated by the generosity of [...]
‘Do what thou wilt’ includes willing to do what thou shouldst not. The Liberal takes a stand in No Man’s Land between ‘the law that is in my members’ and ‘the law that is in my mind.’ In that precarious and self-righteous place, doing what thou wilt is separate from the good. By doing evil [...]