Quote by Yuval Levin

“Believe me, sir,” he writes in the Reflections, “those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.” quote by Yuval Levin — Download Open image

““Believe me, sir,” he writes in the Reflections, “those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.””

Yuval Levin

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“On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy,” Burke wrote in the Reflections, “which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the…

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“Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle,” Burke writes.”

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“What is remarkable in Burke’s first performance,” wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, “is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself.”4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism…

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“Burke argued that political parties were not, as many people insisted, factions each contending for its own particular advantage, but rather were bodies of men each united by a vision of the common good of the whole nation. Partisanship, he insisted, was not only unavoidable but also beneficial, as it helped to organize politics into camps defined by different priorities…

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“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of…

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“Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and…

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“Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of…

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“The idea of forcing every thing to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it,” Burke writes. “It has all…

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“[T]heories inevitably can't be as complex as life itself.”

Yuval Levin

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“The middle layers of society, where people see each other face to face, offer a middle ground between radical individualism and extreme centralization. Our…

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