But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighte… - Herbert Butterfield

Perhaps only in the shock of 1940 did we realize to what a degree the British Empire had become an organization for the purpose of liberty. What power is in this English tradition which swallows up monarchy, toryism, imperialism, yet leaves each of them still existing, each part of a wider synthesis. And how cunningly did the whig interpretation assert itself in all the utterances of Englishmen in 1940—throbbing and alive again, and now projected upon an extended map.

If history can do anything it is to remind us of those complications that undermine our certainties, and to show us that all our judgements are merely relative to time and circumstance. ...we can never assert that history has proved any man right in the long run.

When human beings lost the unique place which in Christianity they had held amongst all created things, and became no longer the end and purpose of the created universe, but a mere part of nature, the highest of the animals—a more intricate organization of matter than the beasts of the field, but part and parcel of the same system—then, fallen as they were from the dignity of eternal souls, it was easy to think of them as not (from a terrestrial point of view) ends in themselves, but as means to an end; each of them not a whole, but a part of some higher system, some super-person, whether the Volk or the New Order or the deified State. Once that superpersonality has been brought into existence, then the Rubicon has been crossed; for nothing—nothing at least in the universe of modern rationalism—can prevent the Leviathan from growing until it has swallowed every right of the individual.