If everybody's behavior can be explained by simple stupidity and greed, there's no point in assuming a conspiracy.
Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.
Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.
The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder. . . . What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.
We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
The commercial music video industry is very hard to break into, and until you break in, that first job is the hardest thing in the world to get.
I hope baseball doesn't get to the point where everyone's saying, 'He takes it [steroids]. He takes it. He takes it!' because not all of us do. I've been big my whole life, and I'll always be big. That's all natural.
All men are born equal, but quite a few eventually get over it.
Revenge is a debt, in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual.