“Change, of course, is inevitable. We need not be committed to change as good in itself to have the experience of change. We are mortal, temporal beings and change is ineluctable. Fixity is not our earthly fate, even if we long for it. Yet to subscribe to the idea of change as intrinsically good (and not to think of it as simply a necessity), and to couple that idea with efforts to engineer change in the hope that someday we will be content, is a recipe for oscillation between utopian expectations and disillusionment.”

“Like Hobbes, Oakeshott couples a constant remembrance of the reasons for mankind to be humble, rather than proud, with a striking belief in the capacity of men so instructed to create a world for themselves in which there is much to delight in: we need political authority; we do not need symposiarchs or cultural arbiters, nor, finally, prophets.”

“Oakeshott believed that we might consider becoming less preoccupied with the world of getting and spending, less prone to measure our well-being in quantitative terms, allowing ourselves to find delight in the poetic interstices of the daily world. This means looking for the possibilities available to us in the present, not always thinking that we must commit ourselves to what may come in the future. Abstracting ourselves from present circumstances, a liberation that is at best partial, for the sake of an idyllic future, moves us toward constant dissatisfaction and anxiety, thinking that all present accomplishments are of little value compared with a hypothetical perfection that we have taught ourselves to seek.”

“Real conversation is an undirected engagement in which one distinctive voice is not reduced to another (there is, Oakeshott said, no ‘symposiarch’ or ‘arbiter’,’ no mode of all the modes), and by means of which human being discovers and distinguishes itself from all other being. The conversational prospect is where a glorious realization of the inherent freedom of the human spirit can appear.”