This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the … - Michael Joseph Oakeshott

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Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

Articulate, Believe, Diversity, Intercourse, Quality

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Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Among, Dream, Flower, Planted, Wheat

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Bliss, Convenient, Facts, Laughter, Perfect, Superabundant

The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better.

Believe, Conservative, Lightly, Man, Men, Surrendered

In political activity. . . men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.

Enterprise, Floor, Men, Political, Sail, Sea

Politics I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together. In this sense, families, clubs, and learned societies have their 'politics'. But the communities in which this manner of activities is pre-eminent are the hereditary co-operative groups, many of them of ancient lineage, all of them aware of a past, a present and a future, which we call states.

Aware, Lineage, Past, People, Political, States