Michael Joseph Oakeshott famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Laughter #Perfect #Facts
Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Dream #Flower #Wheat
Education is ... the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Forever #Conversation #Here And Now
It is difficult to thinkof any circumstances where learning may be said to be impossible.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#May #Impossible #Said
We consider ourselves to be free because no one in our society is allowed unlimited powerno leader, faction, party or 'class', no majority, no government, church, corporation, trade, or professional association or trade union. The secret of its freedom is that it is composed of a multitude of organisations in the constitution of the best of which is reproduced that diffusion of power which is characteristic of the whole.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Party #Government #Class
The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Past #Voice #May
A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Past #Journey #Knowing
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.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Men #Sea #Political
Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Squares #Able #Meals
Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Support #Political #Purpose
History is what the evidence compels us to believe.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Believe #History #Evidence
The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Law #Bread #States
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.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Believe #Diversity #Quality
Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.
-- Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#Inheritance #Heirs #Succeed

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