Michael Oakshott Quotes

I personally don't feel the need to be radical for its own sake, but I probably couldn't if I tried anyway.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

Piety and virtue lie in obedience and conformity, while nothing is more repugnant than change and innovation.

Powerful imaginations are conservative.

I rarely ever do anything crazy, I really like to be careful to stay in a safe spot, I don't want to do anything, like, insane. I have a lot of people around me to make sure I don't do anything crazy.

I'm always the "less is more" guy when it comes to a scene. So I'ma be the one who will keep it grounded. Even if I let it go off and go crazy, I'm still the voice of keeping things grounded in reality.

I like simplicity; I don't need luxury.

Hug the shore; let others try the deep.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

I was a wild child. It's nice, though, now to have grown up and be normal and domestic. I've become very traditional. Conservative, worldly and very wise but fun.

The Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries long life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side—the side of corruption and prerogative.

That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the absolute, to find out what is within our powers.

The great value of the two party system is that after the progressive party has taken a step forward in the face of agonized yells, the conservatives come in and—true to their platform—change nothing at all. Such is the way dangerous innovations turn into glorious traditions.

Government is the art of the momentarily feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

Conservatism is the politics of reality.

All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities.

I want to be progressive without getting both feet off the ground at the same time.

A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.

The best position the government could assume would be that of moderation between opposite extremes of Ultra-Toryism and Radicalism

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

We are a moderate, pragmatic people, more comfortable with practice than theory.

I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

It is easier to make our wishes conform to our means than to make our means conform to our wishes.