Sense of sacrifice is good but only if you’re sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another’s life you’ve overstepped the mark.
Nor should we be surprised that it is absent from the world of the Islamists – even though forgiveness has an important place in the practice of Islam and in the morality of the Koran.4
It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.
Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that self-interest can solve this problem. Given a free economy and an impartial rule of law, self-interest leads towards an optimal distribution of resourc...
I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher’s motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual’s life is h...
Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow th...
But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from cou...
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, le...
When the Communist Party took over Eastern Europe, its first work was to destroy the civil associations that it did not control.
The worst mistake in politics is the mistake made by Lenin – the mistake of destroying the institutions and procedures whereby mistakes can be recognized. Something
No market economy can function properly without the support of legal and moral sanctions, designed to hold individual agents to their bargains, and to return the cost of misbehaviour to the one who ca...
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.
Looks are voluntary. But the full revelation of the subject in the face is not, as a rule, voluntary. Smiles are usually involuntary, and gift smiles, as one might call them, always so. Likewise laugh...
In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the...
Drudgery means doing an ungrateful task for an ungrateful person – and anyone employed at the bottom of the labour market knows what that means. The
Paul Benacerraf, ‘What Numbers Could Not Be,’ Philosophical Review (1965).
No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us...
Spinoza left a celebrated description of his life’s endeavour: After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the...