Ordinary conservatives – and many, possibly most, people fall into this category – are constantly told that their ideas and sentiments are reactionary, prejudiced, sexist or racist. Just by being the...
Locke’s essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree, as one of the virtues of a liberal society. But many who call themselves liberal...
Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there’s a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you’re a chemist who is really inte...
Here we should notice a peculiar fact: that there are movements which are both essentially involuntary and yet confined to persons - to creatures with a self-conscious perspective. Smiles and blushes...
... it is not the taste considered in itself, that we hold to our lips, and you can no more understand the virtues of a wine through a blind tasting than you could understand the virtues of a woman th...
Without a criterion enabling us to distinguish genuine human rights from the many impostors we will never be sure that our legal provisions, however wise, benevolent and responsible, will be secure ag...
The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible.
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.
Opportunities are enhanced not by closing things down, but by opening things up. It is by allowing autonomous institutions to grow, by protecting the space in which they flourish, and
Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgement on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of musi...
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...
If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Žižek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism...
I say it was immediately apparent, but it was not apparent to the intellectual class, which has remained largely wedded to the post-war consensus to this day. The
Value begins where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange.
So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labour included, and can trade those things freely with others. They can buy, sell, accumulate, save, shar...
Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.
Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. I...
Judgement requires, then, the joint operation of sensibility and understanding. A mind without concepts would have no capacity to think; equally, a mind armed with concepts, but with no sensory data t...
In a sense you are always more clearly aware than I can be of what I am in the world; and when I confront my own face, there may be a moment of fear, as I try to fit the person whom I know so well to...
We should not value education as a means to prosperity but prosperity as a means to education. Only then will our priorities be right. For education unlike prosperity is an end in itself. .. power a...