What needs to be explained is not particularly why Roman Catholics go to church, but why Protestants don't. Somehow the gut seems to have gone out of… - Maurice Cowling

[L]ow-keyed respectability...is the real religion of the English people.

I mean the liberalism which parades conscience more often than conscience ought to be paraded and which assumes that anyone who feels unable to use its language, or support its policies, is an idiot, a knave or a reactionary. I mean the liberalism to be found in the Guardian, the Observer and the new Times whose topics are race relations, crime, Africa, under-developed peoples, the indiscriminate expansion of university education and the maintenance of the illusory influence of a liberal Britain though the multiracial Commonwealth and the United Nations.

[It is] rational pessimism that provides the strongest justification for a conservative politics.