Michael Oakeshott Quotes
Michael Oakeshott was a British political philosopher and one of the most distinctive English conservatives of the twentieth century. He held chairs at Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics, where he succeeded Harold Laski in the chair of political science. The quotes below are attributed to Michael Oakeshott, organized by topic.
Browse Michael Oakeshott by topic
Michael Oakeshott on Knowledge
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Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“A tradition of behaviour is a tricky thing to get to know.”
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“Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes”
Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory. -
“Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes”
Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality are inseparable. -
“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.”
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“A philosophical essay leaves much to the reader, often saying too little for fear of saying too much; its attention is concentrated, but it does not stay to cross all the ts of the argument; its mood is cautious without being defensive; it is personal but never merely 'subjective'; it does not dissemble the conditionality of the conclusions it throws up and although it may enlighten it does not instruct. It is, in short, a well-considered intellectual adventure recollected in tranquility.”
Preface
Michael Oakeshott on Life
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Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“The conduct of life is a conversation, not an inquiry.”
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“Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”
Wikiquote
Michael Oakeshott on Politics
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“To be conservative 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.”
Rationalism in Politics -
“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.”
Rationalism in Politics -
Attributed to Michael Oakeshott:
“Political education is learning how to participate in an arrangement.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
Wikiquote
Michael Oakeshott on Time
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“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.”
Wikiquote
Michael Oakeshott on Truth
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“Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory.”
Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes -
“Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality are inseparable.”
Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes