Anglicans

"I have never been persuaded by those who claim that the road to good government is via taking more and more decisions out of the hands of the people’s elected representatives. In our parliamentary democracy, politicians are elected to make decisions on behalf of the community. They are elected by the people and, ultimately, they are answerable to the people for the decisions they make. To draw these decisions away from the legislature and the executive and to invest them in the hands of the judiciary would irrevocably change our democracy. And it would hamper our ability to respond to changes in a way that reflects the realities we now face."

"I accept that climate change is a challenge, I accept the broad theory about global warming. I am sceptical about a lot of the more gloomy predictions."

"Leadership of the Liberal Party is a great honour, of which I remain profoundly conscious. It is, moreover, the unique gift of the party room."

"We spent too much time in the first half of the nineties pondering whether we had to become less European so we could become more Asian, whether we had to become less British so we could become more multicultural. We had this perpetual seminar on our national identity, contributed to overwhelmingly by the cultural dietitians. I never thought Australians had any doubt as to what their identity was. And I think we’ve moved on from all of that."

"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for [[w:Barack Obama|[Barack] Obama]] but also for the Democrats."

"A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather."

"Uniquely, Australia is a product of Western civilisation, closely allied to the United States, but located cheek by jowl with the nations of Asia. Both history and geography have given us a rare opportunity; why should we be so foolish as to think that we must choose between the two?"

"I brought a philosophical road map to government. It was bitterly opposed by some but, for a long time, supported by more. Both supporters and critics knew what I stood for."

"Australia wins respect in the world when we display who we are and not what self-appointed cultural dieticians would want us to become. Multiculturalism is not our national cement. Rather it is the Australian achievement, which has many components."

"Monday will be the 25th anniversary of one of the most prophetic speeches in Australian political history. Then prime minister Paul Keating told the National Press Club: "When the government changes, the country changes ... but what we've built in these years is, I think, so valuable - to change it and to lose it, is just a straight appalling loss for Australia." He was dead right. The legacy of John Howard's government is the opposite of the picture he painted on election night in 1996, when he restated that "united Australians were infinitely more important and more enduring than the things that divided Australians". Instead, he favoured the well-off, the strong and big business over the vulnerable, the less wealthy and wage and salary earners."

"John Howard was prime minister and it was a hard time in the indigenous world; it was difficult to know how to deal with what was happening"

"I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more busybody than the Victorian."

"Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than the vacillating gods."

"[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright."

"[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear."

"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends."

"Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain."

"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."

"It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings."

"And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is."

"This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

""What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually— our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we'll never get outside of it."But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted."

"It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively: something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart."

"In Burke's eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke's view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on. I was more exhilarated by those ideas than by anything else in Burke, since they seemed to explain with the utmost clarity the dim intuitions that I had had in 1968, as I watched the riots from my window... In those deft, cool thoughts, Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation, all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the future that has dominated and perverted modern politics."

"As the prophets of international peace and understanding sang hymns to the coming universal communion of humanity, Burke thundered back, in effect: Nature! I'll tell you about Nature. You imagine it's all the same, daisychains and hands across the seas and songs of fraternity. But what you're talking about is the brotherhood of intellectuals who sip from the same little cups of chocolate, chatter away the same clichés and dream the same puerile dream. But nature, my friends, is lived, not thought. Nature is familiarity, a feeling for place. Nature is a patriot."

"Mr. Burke has made himself very considerable. He is the most ingenious debater I ever heard, and at least as strong in the reply as in the opening."

"In 1756 Edmund Burke published his first work: Vindication of Natural Society. Curiously enough it has been almost completely ignored in the current Burke revival. This work contrasts sharply with Burke's other writings, for it is hardly in keeping with the current image of the Father of the New Conservatism. A less conservative work could hardly be imagined; in fact, Burke's Vindication was perhaps the first modern expression of rationalistic and individualistic anarchism. ... "Anarchism" is an extreme term, but no other can adequately describe Burke's thesis. Again and again, he emphatically denounces any and all government, and not just specific forms of government... All government, Burke adds, is founded on one "grand error." It was observed that men sometimes commit violence against one another, and that it is therefore necessary to guard against such violence. As a result, men appoint governors among them. But who is to defend the people against the governors? ... The anarchism of Burke's Vindication is negative, rather than positive. It consists of an attack on the State rather than a positive blueprint of the type of society which Burke would regard as ideal. Consequently, both the communist and the individualist wings of anarchism have drawn sustenance from this work."

"Burke believes that individuals achieve their humanity only within their particular, inherited traditions, including social customs, manners, narratives, and even prejudices, which on balance are useful in shaping and extending human sympathies."

"Chivalry for Burke reverses the all-too-human tendency to believe that "might makes right." Chivalry requires the powerful—those capable of inspiring others with the fear of death, terror, and the other aspects of the sublime—to subordinate their power to the interests and needs of the weak."

"Ever since 1953, when Russell Kirk produced its intellectual coat of arms, conservatism has been "what Edmund Burke wrote." This is the equivalent of Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art — art is whatever the art world says it is. But it's also a cop-out. Instead of analyzing conservatism in an Aristotelian way, instead of asking how we use the term in real life, we just describe Burke. In the process, don't we risk fleeing into what Tanenhaus calls an "alternative universe"? If conservatives are "glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America," as Tanenhaus says, why is the solution to be more like a man who wore a powdered wig? Liberals have problems of their own, but, to their credit, they don't sit around debating whether Hillary Clinton or John Edwards is the "real Rousseauian.""

"Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was an ardent proponent of the idea that there is decisive wisdom in the ways of a people. No one can mistake Burke for a partisan of populist democracy. Quite the contrary, he was a defender of a well-structured society, where customs and traditions are respected, and religious institutions play an undeniable role in preserving a wealthy society. There is something almost mystical in the ability of a people to wisely pursue initiatives, grounded in a deep respect for the spiritual meaning of existence, for the sake of the public good. Institutions should recognize this and collaborate with citizens for a better world. This is Burke’s perspective, and I am sure that Dr. Hong [Tao-Tze, grandmaster of the Taijimen qigong menpai,] would subscribe to it, adding that the pivotal instrument here is human conscience."

"We consider that our especial commendation and the testimony of our heart may be justly claimed by those who, in this time of apostasy and impiety, have exerted the force of their genius that they might write in defence of the cause of right... Amongst them you have stood out as one of the foremost, in that you have composed a famous work to overthrow and utterly destroy the fictions of the new philosophers of France, and have exhorted your fellow country-men...to show indulgences to Catholics born in the realm of Great Britain... [T]herefore it is our wish that you should accept with joyful and cheerful heart our congratulations and praises, which have this especial object—that you should more and more exert yourself to protect the cause of civilization."

"I return Burke's letter, which is like other rhapsodies from the same pen, in which there is much to admire, and nothing to agree with."

"Burke [has] the palm of political prophecy."

"Burke squarely contended that party-divisions were, for good or evil, "things inseparable from free government"; and in his well-known eulogy of party as a union of men endeavouring to promote the national interest on a common principle, gave a forecast of parliamentary government. Men so connected, he wrote, must strive "to carry their common plan into execution with all the power and authority of the State"; in forming an administration give "their party preference in all things"; and not "accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included". While professing adherence to the Revolution Settlement, by implication he eliminated the rights of the Crown, and obliquely argued that in fact the royal executive had ceased to exist, replaced by the monstrous contraption of a cabal set on separating "the Court from Administration". The "double Cabinet", a product of Burke's fertile, disordered, and malignant imagination, long bedevilled his own party and their spiritual descendants."

"The greatest, most profound, mightiest and most human of all statesmen of all times and of all nations...I say it with pride, he belongs more to us than to the British. I glory in the fact that my own ideas of the State...are hopeful children of his mind. He is recognized in Germany as the most influential and happiest mediator, between separation and unity of powers and of labor, between the principles of nobility and that of the bourgeoisie, and thus, no matter how influential his deeds may have been for Great Britain, his glory belongs to the German sphere."

"He is a great theme. What a mind! His fame grows greater with time. Macaulay was right when he said of certain passages, “How divine!” Who can compare with him? Taine? Tocqueville? No."

"But what a mind was Burke's! Macaulay was right, the greatest mind since Milton."

"The distinction between nature and artifice belongs to the philosophy of the Enlightenment... Burke recognised this point, and met it head on by insisting that artifice was human nature. "We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected..." Indeed, in prefacing these rhetorical remarks with "We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity" he attempted to reverse the criteria of nature and artifice, so that it was the revolutionaries who appeared corrupt and artificial."

"My theme is the cultural struggle between the idea of a process, and that of a starting point... This cultural struggle is found at its liveliest in the field of politics, and one of its particular skirmishes is Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The issue raised by that book may be simplified into the question: is revolution or tradition the idea by which the process of politics may be best understood? Burke was confronted by a body of men who sought in every possible way to create an unbridgeable gap between the ancien régime and the new order being unfolded in France during the 1790s. They renamed streets and months, abolished the historic provinces of France, and set up temples for the new cults they espoused. Burke argued that this was both unwise and impossible, insisting on the ubiquity of tradition in a manner similar to that in which he had previously insisted upon the ubiquity of law in the case of Warren Hastings. We are all, Burke argued, the products of tradition, and the illusion that we can escape from our past is entirely crippling. The melodramatic turbulence with which men attempted to break out of their pasts appeared merely as a colossal folly."

"The sycophant — who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy — was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois."

"Burke...is held by every party in England as the paragon of British statesmen."

"Of Burke he spoke with rapture, declaring that he was in, in his estimation, without any parallel in any age or country, except, perhaps, Lord Bacon and Cicero; that his works contained an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than could be found in any other writer whatever."

"Burke is one of those extraordinary contradictions which could only have been produced in England. He was an almost fanatical believer in justice and good government, and his sympathies went beyond his own country; they embraced humanity at large. But he was passionately attached to the order of things as then existing. He fondled error and fostered paradox until he came to be the defender of rotten boroughs and close corporations. His “Reflections on the French Revolution” had probably a greater influence on English history than any other pamphlet or piece of writing. They marked a turn in the tide; then came the September Massacres and the execution of the king. A cry of horror arose in England, and Burke's voice rose higher. “This,” men cried, “is the end of Reform! Are we, too, to drift to the same end—the same excesses?” The propertied classes, the Church, everyone who had anything to lose, declaimed against the Revolution, and the cause of Reform was postponed for forty years."

"I have now finished reading again most of Burke's works. Admirable! The greatest man since Milton."

"Hindostan, with its vast cities, its gorgeous pagodas, its infinite swarms of dusky population, its long descended dynasties, its stately etiquette, excited in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so susceptible, the most intense interest. The peculiarities of the costume, of the manners, and of the laws, the very mystery which hung over the language and origin of the people, seized his imagination. To plead under the ancient arches of Westminster Hall, in the name of the English people, at the bar of the English nobles, for great nations and kings separated from him by half the world, seemed to him the height of human glory."

"Mr. Burke assuredly possessed an understanding admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, an understanding stronger than that of any statesman, active or speculative, of the eighteenth century, stronger than every thing, except his own fierce and ungovernable sensibility. Hence he generally chose his side like a fanatic, and defended it like a philosopher."

"In his own epoch, I do not think that anyone, save perhaps Chatham, can compete with him in energy of mind; none certainly in the combination of energy of mind with the power of profound reflection. He was often wrong; he was often prejudiced; he was sometimes carried away by those gusts of passion which not seldom mark, as they did in him, the weakness of a noble nature. Your founder at any rate devoted all his immense capacity to the single purpose of improving the condition of mankind. That was his major ambition; it is notable in how large a degree he achieved it. Nil tetigit quod non ornavit can be said of him as of few figures in the combined history of our two nations for the two centuries that have elapsed since he wrote down the minutes of your meetings. May what he did be an example and an inspiration to those who follow him along the difficult road he had the courage to tread."