The Uses of Modern Poetry

Undoubtedly the most characteristic, if not the gravest, vice of the Liberal mind is the eager monkey-like busyness with which it pries into and tries to organize other people’s affairs. But lest we as conservatives look in our own eye too complacently, we ought to recognize that we too have a characteristic vice.

Our enemies call it smugness. I should prefer to call it laziness: the spiritual laziness of the servant in the parable, who kept his talent laid up in a napkin.