A brilliant man was lost to this world, and one hopes, finds rest in the next. Of all the recent tributes I have read about the amazing accomplishments and brilliant mind of Buckley, I like this quote, which I have stolen from Ben at HouseBlog, courtesy of GG:
I am asked most frequently by members of the lecture audience, 'What is conservatism?' Sometimes the questioner, guarding against a windy evasiveness one comes to expect from lecturers, will add, 'preferably in one sentence.' On which I have replied, 'I could not give you a definition of Christianity in one sentence, but that does not mean Christianity is undefinable...
Yet I feel I know, if not what conservatism is, at least who a conservative is. I confess that I know who is a conservative less surely than I know who is a liberal. Blindfold me, spin me about like a top, and I will walk up to the single liberal in the room without zig or zag and find him even if he is hiding behind the flower pot. I am tempted to try to develop an equally sure nose for the conservative, but I am deterred by the knowledge that conservatives, under the stress of our times, have had to invite all kinds of people into their ranks to help with the job at hand, and the natural courtesy of the conservative causes him to treat such people not as janissaries, but as equals; and so empirically, it becomes difficult to see behind the khaki, to know surely whether that is a conservative over there doing what needs to be done, or a radical, or merely a noisemaker, or pyrotechnician, since our ragtag army sometimes moves together in surprising uniformity, and there are exhilarating moments when everyone's eye is Right...
~W. F. Buckley, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?If you missed the Charlie Rose show from Wednesday night (February 27), you can watch much of it here. It was both elucidating and moving. The ending section is below:
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