The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

• One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
• The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
• By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
• In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
• Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
• Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
• There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
• Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
• War remains the decisive human failure.
• In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.