Oakeshott Quotes

#1. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.

Joseph Epstein

#2. The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#3. For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

Michael Oakeshott

#4. The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#5. The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.

Michael Oakeshott

#6. to see a thing completely is to set it in relation with the universe.

Michael Oakeshott

#7. Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#8. Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.

Michael Oakeshott

#9. A child might possibly change his country; a man can only wish that he might change it.

Michael Oakeshott

#10. Image the whole, then execute the parts - Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz Ere mortar dab brick!

Michael Oakeshott

#11. To define a thing is to see it clearly, to see it as distinct from other things and at the same time to see its exact relationship with other things: for a thing is its relations and activities.

Michael Oakeshott

#12. Property was thus appall'd / That the self was not the same / Single nature's double name / Neither two nor one was call'd.

Michael Oakeshott

#13. To be educated is to know how much one wishes to know and to have the courage not to be tempted beyond this limit .

Michael Oakeshott

#14. A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#15. Browning: 'Justinian's Pandects only make precise / What simply sparkled in men's eyes before'.

Michael Oakeshott

#16. For most people, political activity is a secondary activity - that is to say, they have something else to do beside attending to these arrangements. But the activity is one which every member of the group who is not a child nor a lunatic has some part and some responsibility.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#17. In political activity ... men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.

Michael Oakeshott

#18. Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#19. There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.' Ruskin

Michael Oakeshott

#20. Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Michael Oakeshott

#21. A so-called ideal scheme which does not grow out of reality is definitely and finally not ideal at all.

Michael Oakeshott

#22. When Plutarch says that a city might sooner subsist without a geographical site than without belief in the gods, his words would not have appeared strange to his countrymen at any time.']

Michael Oakeshott

#23. History is what the evidence compels us to believe.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#24. Strength we think to be a virtue in government, but we do not find our defense against disintegration either in arbitrary or in very great power. Indeed, we are inclined to see in both these the symptoms of an already advanced decay

Michael Oakeshott

#25. It is difficult to thinkof any circumstances where learning may be said to be impossible.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#26. Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#27. It is certain that most who concentrate upon achievement miss life.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#28. To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#29. The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#30. potestas is specific, auctoritas is extendable and can grow.

Michael Oakeshott

#31. An ideal society, properly so-called, can be none other than an actual, present, society taken at its truest and best.

Michael Oakeshott

#32. For there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellence of it, to its neighbours.

Michael Oakeshott

#33. Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#34. Education is ... the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#35. Culture teaches that there is much one does not want to know .

Michael Oakeshott

#36. I have wasted a lot of time living.

Michael Oakeshott