Allen Roberts’s Reviews > The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump > Status Update

“While John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith are often cited by the more genteel defenders of conservatism as the movement’s leading lights, their writings cannot account for what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood…” p. 190

“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.” p. 167

“Contrary to the romantic notion of art being produced by a process of ‘letting go,’ Nietzsche insisted that the artist ‘strictly and subtly… obeys thousandfold laws.’” p. 152

“…[S]ublimity of whatever kind and source depends on murkiness: get too close to anything, whether an object or experience, see and feel its full extent, and it loses its mystery and aura.” p. 87 All too true in most cases, sadly…

“That is the task of right-wing populism: to appeal to the mass without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites.” p. 52

“… [A]ll conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary.” p. 29

“In order to keep the state out of the hands of the people,” wrote the French monarchist Louis de Bonald, “it is necessary to keep the family out of the hands of women and children.” p. 15