F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

[F]ormal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and . . . any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not to give them the same subjective chance. It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality -- all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

A "leap of progress" is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next. The growth of insight -- in science, in the arts, in philosophy and theology -- has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of the tradition, and it does not work that way now. By including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation. Of course we do not listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape recording of the tradition. That really would be the dead faith of the living, not the living faith of the dead. But we do acquire the "insight" for which Emerson was pleading when we learn to interact creatively with the "tradition" which he was denouncing.

[in Part Four, "Tradition as Heritage: A Vindication"]

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

[in Part Four, "Tradition as Heritage: A Vindication"]

Walter Berns, "The Need for Public Authority"

This country was officially founded on the principle of self-interest. "To secure these rights," says the Declaration of Independence, and these rights are private rights, "governments are instituted among men." Men institute government for selfish reasons. That was, and is, the principle on which we built. But, of course, the "we" who build on this principle were not simply self-interested men, not simply Hobbesian or Lockean men. We were, to an overwhelming extent, civilized Englishmen or British-men. We were not essentially private men: we were united in families, in churches, in towns and a host of other institutions. We were men whose habits had been acquired from a civilized past, whose character had been formed under the laws of an older and civilized politics. Moreover, while the national government did nothing in this area, the states, through their laws, continued to support the private institutions -- the churches, the families -- whose job it was to generate good moral habits. The states also provided a public education that was designed in large part to provide sound moral training. The states did not hesitate to act as censor.

I think what I have said above is sufficient to illustrate my point: we were founded on liberal principles, but we used the public authority in nonliberal ways.

[reprinted in "Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate" (George W. Carey ed. 1998)]