Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing is more useful than the useless.
The best evidence of a mind is when you change it
Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.
If there's a local reeling party, I might go to that.
The pageant of a former hour, Is Beauty in the Grave.
Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.
Music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world
The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.
A lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.
When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.
When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.
I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.
When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.
Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.
Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.
It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.
It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.
Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.
Being unpopular is never easy; but being unpopular in a good cause is a shield against despair.
I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially ceilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing.
Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next
The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.
Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford's was.
When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment
I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.
A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.
On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David's.
Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.
When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.
Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
There is a deep human need for beauty and if you ignore that need in architecture your buildings will not last
The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.
My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.
To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.
Conservatives resonate to Burke's view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.