The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudic… - Russell Kirk

Those who neglect the roots of order, one may add, are compelled to water those roots desperately — after wandering in the parched wasteland of disorder. Upon our knowledge of those roots may depend what sort of order America and the world will have by the end of this century. It may be the order of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, rich and dehumanized; it may be the garrison-state controlled by ferocious ideology, as in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four; or it may be an order renewed and improved, yet recognizably linked with the order that arose in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London.

True conservatism rises at the antipodes from individualism. Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit.

The conservative knows that freedom without any restraints may lead to oppression or anarchy, just as government without any restraints may lead to collectivism. But he believes the best and most effective restraint upon anarchic individualism to be obedience to moral law, the private conscience.