From a friend's Facebook:

"A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution." -- Edmund Burke

Nowadays all you hear is that the West is dead, American is dying, all is lost. That may be very true, but it is too early to tell. Most of us would grant that our current course leads to death; the conclusion that death is inevitable, however, depends on us following out this course to the bitter end. That is possible, but by no means certain. In the days of Anno Domini, it is no longer a safe assumption that the path to death once entered upon must be pursued to the end. In this respect the civilizations of antiquity are an incomplete pattern.

"At the very moment when some [nations] seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature." - Edmund Burke, from Letters on a Regicide Peace.

"...The prophet is mindful that in their desperate straits God suddenly and wonderfully and beyond all hope succors the poor and almost lost; those wandering through the desert he protects from wild beasts and at last guides them back to the way; to the needy and hungry he supplies food; the prisoners he frees from loathsome dungeons and iron bands; the shipwrecked he leads back to port unharmed; the half dead he cures of disease; he burns the earth with eat and dryness, or makes it fertile with the secret watering of grace; he raises up the humblest from the crowd, or casts down the lofty from the high level fo their dignity." - Calvin, Institutes, I.V.8.

Here's the concluding paragraph of Jefferson Davis's 1858 speech before the Mississippi legislature:

Now, as in 1851, I hold separation from the Union by the State of Mississippi to be the last remedy—the final alternative. In the language of the venerated Calhoun I consider the disruption of the Union as a great though not the greatest calamity. I would cling tenaciously to our constitutional Gov­ernment, seeing as I do in the fraternal Union of equal States the benefit to all and the fulfillment of that high destiny which our fathers hoped for and left it for their sons to attain. I love the flag of my country with even more than a filial affection. Mississippi gave me in my boyhood to her military service. For many of the best years of my life I have followed that flag and upheld it on fields where if I had fallen it might have been claimed as my winding sheet. When I have seen it surrounded by the flags of foreign countries, the pulsations of my heart have beat quicker with every breeze which displayed its honored stripes and brilliant constellation. I have looked with venera­tion on those stripes as recording the original size of our po­litical family and with pride upon that constellation as mark­ing the family’s growth; I glory in the position which Missis­sippi’s star holds in the group; but sooner than see its lustre dimmed—sooner than see it degraded from its present equality—would tear it from its place to be set even on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi’s best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death.

I love this. First of all it's magnificent oratory--eloquent, but tight and pristine, and relying on a multitude of clear and concrete images. But it's also a model expression of conservative resolution: conservative, because he loves the union and wishes to maintain it as long as possible, but resolute, in that he realizes that the union is not an absolute entity, that there are only strict conditions on which it can be maintained, and that if he is pushed to it, he will fight for the principle over the form.