Principle #6: Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.

If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.

Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth .

How could he uphold the law when that law upheld injustice?

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

Dogmation is puppyism come to its full growth.

When I was little I always thought I was marked out, special, on the verge of something momentous. I used to tingle with anticipation.

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.

I can cook; but not well. I figure I have six years until my children discover what their friends' mothers make for dinner.

That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience.... Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is.

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.

It's never gone so far as me wishing I'd never done 'Quadrophenia,' but there was a time when I wouldn't talk about it because I wanted people to be interested in me for other things as well.

The only war that we must all fight is the one against evil.