Home > Work > The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
1 " Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists. "
― George F. Will , The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
2 " There may be arrogance – and the laziness of someone who is indefatigable when doing what he enjoys, but only when doing that. "
3 " People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium. "
4 " In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos "
5 " When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but, at the same time, he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. His every day becomes more of adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that, in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. Alexis de Tocqueville "
6 " He was one of the fortunate few for whom there simply was no discernible line between work and play, between creation and recreation. "
7 " Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like. "
8 " In Gladstone's mature years he lost faith not in God but in the ability of any government or state to act as the agent of God. "
9 " Enough anecdotes make a pattern. "
10 " Politics is always driven by competing worries. "
11 " A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past. "
12 " From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft. "
13 " In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon "
14 " Economics has accurately been called the science of the single instance. "
15 " The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect. "
16 " There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred. "
17 " There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past. "
18 " Lacking an articulable defense of the cultural values under siege, he became a vessel of smoldering animosities. "
19 " Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day. "
20 " Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt. "
