Alfred, Lord Tennyson Quotes
That man's the true Conservative who lops the moldered branch away.
Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, vol. 1, Macmillan and Co., 1897.
There are a few modern progressive conservatives who believe this point of view, but most generally resist change.
1st Baron Macaulay. See {620691} for a related idea.
5th Earl of Rosebery. At this point in history, America was growing rapidly, but had not yet become a dominant superpower. Rosebery was prescient enough to realize that although England was the great superpower of the time, the very conservative values were holding the nation back. He saw America as the model, even when England was still the dominant empire in the world.
This statement is very revealing in that it illustrates the attitude of the establishment of most developing nations. Traditional change is OK as long as it is not does transformational—ie as long as it does not make any meaningful changes. But modernization requires transformational change; without it there is no major reform and all institutions and power structures remain in their positions.
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS was a British poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
