Michael Oakeshott Quotes (12 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Michael Oakeshott: 12 quotes11 likes

Famous Michael Oakeshott Quotes

“The predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off the liquid in which our moral ideals were suspended (and pouring it away as worthless) that we are left only with the dry and gritty residue which chokes us as we try to take it down. First, we do our best to destroy parental authority (because of its alleged abuse), then we sentimentally deplore the scarcity of 'good homes', and we end by creating substitutes which complete the work of destruction. And it is for this reason that, among much else that is corrupt and unhealthy, we have the spectacle of a set of sanctimonious, rationalist politicians, preaching an ideology of unselfishness and social service to a population in which they and their predecessors have done their best to destroy the only living root of moral behaviour; and opposed by another set of politicians dabbling with the project of converting us from Rationalism under the inspiration of a fresh rationalization of our political tradition.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

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

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

“Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by 'reason' and satisfied according to the technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

“The general character and disposition of the Rationalist are, I think, not difficult to identify. At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of 'reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason' (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

“By one road or another, by conviction, by its supposed inevitability, by its alleged success, or even quite unreflectively, almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Michael Oakeshott Quotes

“Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

“Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory.”

Michael Oakeshott

Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes
Experience and Its Modes (1933)

“Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality are inseparable.”

Michael Oakeshott

Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes
Experience and Its Modes (1933)

“Understanding is not such that we either enjoy it or lack it altogether. To be human and to be aware is to encounter only what is in some manner understood. Thus, it may be said that understanding is an unsought condition; we inexorably inhabit a world of intelligibles.”

Michael Oakeshott

I. On the Theoretical Understanding of Human Conduct
On Human Conduct (1975)

“By a pardonable abridgment of history, the Rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon's hopes and the neglect of the scepticism of Descartes; modern Rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

“In political activity, then, 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; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.”

Michael Oakeshott

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

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