Ask not what your age wants, Brownson said, "but what it needs; not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and… - Russell Kirk

To the immense majority of men, even in civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita. Yet it is not the less true, that all the epoch-forming Revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems. So few are the minds that really govern the machine of society, and so incomparably more numerous and more important are the indirect consequences of things than their foreseen and direct effects.

There is no such thing as a General Will (the delusion of Rousseau) or the Virtue of the Proletariat (the delusion of Marx) or the Rational Citizen (the delusion of John Stuart Mill). No mysterious wisdom abides in the bosom of the People to which we can appeal in this hour of our need. The public is not going to protest against stupid television programs or hysterical newspapers or the decay of our schools. The public, or the masses, have no mind or coherence, accurately speaking. In our time, the public takes what it is given.

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.