- Beowulf: If we don't admire heroes, there's something wrong with us
- Chaucer: Chivalry has contributed enormously to women's happiness
- Shakespeare: Some choices are inherently destructive (it's just built into the nature of things)
- Milton: Our intellectual freedoms are Christian, not anti-Christian, in origin
- Jane Austen: Most men would be improved if they were more patriarchal than they actually are
- Dickens: Reformers can do more harm than the injustices they set out to reform
- T. S. Eliot: Tradition is necessary to culture
- Flannery O'Connor: Even modern American liberals aren't immune to original sin